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The LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System kit enables anyone to build programmable robots with an assortment of LEGO pieces that snap, slide, and click into place. In this exciting second edition from MINDSTORMS expert Dave Baum, you'll be able to take your robotics experiments to a new level.

Baum takes you step-by-step through the entire process of building and programming MINDSTORMS robots using both LEGO's RCX code and the author's own, more powerful programming language, Not Quite C (NQC). This edition has been updated with new programs that take advantage of the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 2.0 and includes instructions for building 14 different robots including Tankbot, Bugbot, and Brick Sorter.

With Definitive Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS, Second Edition, you will master the challenging yet always fun creation of your own robots from the ground up!

Average Customer Rating:

NQC

Customer Rating:

I found the projects interesting and the introduction to Not Quite C NQC excellent. The author demonstrates how to connect the touch sensors and light sensors physically and then add programming code to control the logic that produces power from the central processor to a motor that powers a gear. The basics are simple to understand and the project increase in sophistication and complexity. The book explains explains different types of gear ratios, differential gear combinations, power and speed gear ratios, pulleys, power connections, stop latch, levels, frames, sound, and how to simulate an actuator like a grabber. The robotic behavior can be either conditional or remote controlled. I'm a programmer and this book helped me break into the world of robot programming, signal programming, multitask abstraction, and signal processing without having construct the hardware. Lego Mindstorm is a much easier and faster way to build simple robots verses trying to construct all the hardware on your own. Each chapter has a flow chart of tasks and functionality that help explain the logic controlling the robot. I found this book a delight to read and understand.

Good content, but fatally flawed illustrations.

Customer Rating:

This is a first impression, and may be upgraded later. The textual content, including appendices, is good. Unfortunately, the illustrations have inadequate contrast, and are difficult to interpret even under very bright light. This is due to extensive and unnecessary use of gray scale, both in assembly drawings and flow charts(!). While it is quite possible that Apress printed the grayscale much darker than Mr. Baum intended, I believe the decision to use gray scale at all was flawed. On the other hand, the use of isometric ("3D") projections is entirely appropriate. If reprinted with isometric line drawings (no gray scale) I'd probably rate it 5 stars (especially if I could trade in my gray scale version).