Lego Mindstorms Robots

by Jonathan Knudsen and Mike Loukides

Book Overview

The LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System is a wildly popular kit for building mobile robots. Get the most out of the kit for hands-on robot projects, featuring descriptions of advanced mechanical... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565926927
• ISBN13: 9781565926929
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Very good book: A must-see for the MINDSTORMS enthusiast.

I have recently bought a copy of this book. Many of these projects and info are very good to know to programming the RCX and a crash course in legOS, pbForth, etc.

A Work of Art

This book is very well written and easy to read. It starts off slow and simple, and advances into programming "Behavior" based robots, which is very interesting. The chapters on custom sensors don't say that much, but they are still a good intro to homebrew sensors. If you want a compilation of tons of robots to build, buy "Dave Baum's Definitive Guide". If you want a disorganized 'Everything but the kitchen sink' book, buy "Extreme Mindstorms". If you want well written, well structured, well thought out and thought proviking, buy this book.

Take Mindstorms RIS beyond!

Your an adult that never grew out of loving toys, an engineer at heart, and have been bitten by the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Set. Ya have built everything in the Constructopedia, met all of the challenges but are now looking to go beyond the box. Where do you start? Jonathan Knudsen's Unofficial Guide to Ledo Mindstorms may be one of the best answers. He does a great job with construction tips, and provides a great survey of programming alternatives such as NQC, pbForth, and LegOS. He also has some insight into constructing your own sensors. Best of all, each chapter concludes with links to relevant sites on the WWW. I highly recommend it!

Good on the software

This is a well written book by a person comfortable and able in describing the different software platforms and options available for the lego mindstorms set.(This is a surprisingly lively field with C ,forth , visual basic and much else besides putting in an appearance.)But the actual mechanical engineering of building these robots is only covered in literally about 3 or 4 pages including one part where he talks about interesting ways you can set up drive trains that will do 2 seperate things depending on the direction of the motor.NOT just go forward and backwards! lol....Otherwise its really all software.So as I say its in fact an excellent book but just realise that emphasis before you buy it.

Excellent introduction to Mindstorms

As someone with no experience with Lego Mindstorms, but fascinated by the topic, I found this book an excellent introduction to not only the mindstorm kit itself, but also, at a very basic level, the issues of robotics. The book also does an excellent job of surveying the landscape of programming platforms that can be used to program mindstorms and points to many online resources for every aspect of building and programming lego robots.If you are a professional robotics researcher or an experienced Mindstorms developer this book might be a bit basic for you, but for a new comer this book provides a very nice introduction. While in general I like many of the O'Reilly titles, I don't think I've ever had so much fun reading one.