Product Reviews

As a small kid I was hooked on Meccano, largely thanks to my father being an engineer and him passing his enthusiasm for the subject on to me. Now, as an adult, I'm hooked on Lego. No, not the build a giant clown out of small bricks type of Lego, but rather the spend £200 so you can build and program your own working robot kind. The MindStorms Robotics Invention System (RIS) was developed by Lego in conjunction with MIT and has been keeping anoraks, and their children, happy since 1998. The trouble is that the out-of-the-box programming environment is fairly limited in its scope, and certainly doesn't have the required oomph for building truly complex robotic projects.

Which is where this book comes to the rescue, or at least promises

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to. It features hands-on, step-by-step, robot projects. There are detailed explanations of advanced mechanical techniques like the mathematics of gears, for example, as well as the necessary instructions for building and using multiple light sensors. I suspect that the majority of purchasers will find it most useful for its coverage of programming with third-party languages such as Not Quite C (NQC), pbFORTH and legOS. You'll even learn how to use the Lego MindStorms SDK with Visual Basic to control a robot directly. All of this is possible thanks to the RCX (Robotic Command Explorer), the robot brain if you like. This is programmable, and the book explains its software architecture and programming options nicely.

The book itself goes way beyond the disappointing official documentation that comes with the kit. However, I'd have liked a few more robot projects to build, and it would have been nice if the step-by-step guide illustrations were in colour. The black-and-white photos, even with text labels, were hard to follow because of a lack of sufficient contrast. More worrying, though, were the few occasions when erroneous photos showed bricks that shouldn't be added until later in a project. My only other complaint is that any MindStorms junky with Internet access can find lots of similar information on-line - for free.