I'm glad to see Lego continuing this line of logic - it's amazing what can be done with these mindstorms with the proper tools.
When I was much younger (about 12 years ago), I built a bipedal walker with gimbaled hips and articulated ankles and knees out of two first gen RCX units, and it managed to get me a free trip to ISEF, which in itself was pretty neat. I was using NQC [1] to program them in tandem, which at the time was pretty neat sauce. I've fallen way out of the loop with these, but it seems like Lego is encouraging good work that removes a lot of the stumbling blocks you'll see when using more bare-bones components like raw servos and arduinos.<p>My only wish was that Lego would start selling 'engineering' sets for those of us that grew up with them to use for prototyping - I got through a few hairy sessions in college using the tub I'd kept from when I was younger, but with the sets these days there's a lot of stuff you don't need. Something like the fischertechnik toys but with lego's distribution and selection of parts. Alas.<p>[1] <a href="http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/" rel="nofollow">http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/</a>
So... back in the day I cross-compiled GCC to write code for the original Mindstorms in C (and to some extent, in C++). That wasn't easy for my early-teen self, but it was possible.<p>To which degree is it possible to program Mindstorms NXT or EV3 in a "real" programming language?
Having played around a bit with the original 1998 Mindstorms hardware, I found that the main factor restricting what I could build was the limit of three input and three output ports. Its a bit disappointing to see that the EV3 has added only one more input and one output port.<p>If Lego had made the physical connectors smaller then I don't see why eight or more sensor inputs couldn't have been allowed. I appreciate that outputs are limited by the on-board power, though.<p>Still, this looks very tempting.
This looks fantastic. My main limitation so far has been memory, but 16 MB ought to be enough for everyone (plus there's an SD card slot).<p>While NXC is pretty simple to program in, I would like to see someone port a Go-like language to it. This would be a more natural fit, as the NXT brick works concurrently and NXC has coroutines doing the work.
A video is available on TC: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/06/lego-mindstorms-ev3-the-better-faster-stronger-generation-of-robotic-programming/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/06/lego-mindstorms-ev3-the-bet...</a>