Mom, do you still have my Lego?
A big disadvantage of failing to blog regularly is that you don’t get to be the first to break the news about something new and exciting; but the Microsoft Robotics Studio is still worth mentioning because building robots has been a love of mine since I was a little boy. Heck! It’s the reason I went to a technical high school and studied mechanical engineering and when I went to college, I did industrial electronics.
I was disappointed in what I learned at school; I couldn’t see the link between the robots in my mind and having to learn what resistors and capacitors do. Like Terry Prachett said, it’s trying to explain accounting using molecular bonding, there’s missing links all the way.
The Robotics Studio (and other kits that are coming out) seems to be taking the steps in abstracting the implementation and the mechanics. Autonomous sensors and motors are connected to a processing unit that can be plugged into a PC and easily programmed. The Lego Mindstorms IDE, for example, uses a drag-and-drop interface to build workflows for the robot to follow. This is very much like what Visual Basic did for Windows development; instead of having to figure out how to draw a button on the screen, monitor the mouse and respond correctly when the user does something it all a developer has to do is drag the control onto his form and handle the event.
Before you get your panties in a twist about availability, the day I first read about the Microsoft Robotics SDK my project lead had just bought his son Lego Mindstorms version 2 at Menlyn in Pretoria for about R2,500. The shop promised that they would have NXT (the next version) when it becomes available and I plan to get myself one of those babies at the first opportunity.
I think we’ll see a lot more to come in this space!
