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by ievans 1325 days ago
Sad to see this as someone who enjoyed these as a kid and entering robotics competitions based off of them; hopefully the new products will keep the spirit alive.

There was even some decent FOSS tooling that developed on top of Mindstorms: I used NXC (Not eXactly C, https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/welcome.html) which was a C-like language for programming Lego Mindstorms. It looks like the last release of NXC was in 2011.
4 comments
teraflop 1325 days ago
Similar story here. I remember getting my first exposure to embedded development at a relatively young age through brickOS (https://brickos.sourceforge.net/), which was a complete replacement operating system for the original Mindstorms RCX (predating the NXT).

That version of the hardware was so old that it didn't even have non-volatile storage. Every time you changed the batteries, it would boot into a minimal ROM bootloader which was just powerful enough to download the rest of the firmware into RAM, via an infrared connection to your PC. That had the nice side effect of making the RCX very hacker-friendly, because it was almost impossible to permanently "brick" it (ha!).

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mFixman 1325 days ago
My first real programming was NQC (Not Quite C, probably related to NXC?). I owe it my programming abilities.

Lego Mindstorms was one of the best creative learning tools you can give a child; my life started the day I stopped using the building manual and started building my own stuff by trial and error.

The world would be a better place if everyone grew up with the opportunities that I did. I wish schools would just let children do whatever with Lego instead of filling your day with restrictive lessons in loud classrooms.

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sethgrisham 1325 days ago
I grew up using mindstorms in FLL and I just began coaching a team this year. I'm pretty impressed with the new Spike Prime, and although it has its quirks, over all I'd say it's a good improvement over the last generation, plus I get to teach the kids python which has honestly been a blast!
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mlyle 1325 days ago
Pybrick/python runs well on both Mindstorms EV3 and the new thing (Spike Prime).
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