Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms 615
nick58b writes "Lego, in response to the worst financial loss in its history, has announced they will stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products. This would include Mindstorms, one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood to be in such dire financial straits. If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
Mindstorm no more! (Score:3, Interesting)
SCO must be behind this somehow!
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:5, Interesting)
Since it reported its first loss of $47.8 million in 1998, Lego has been hit hard by increasing competition from the makers of electronic toys.
It is GBA fault. It is the fault of the game consoles, the computers, and the leap-pad-ish products.
Plastic legos and tinker-toys and cabin logs rocked when I was a child. This year Christmas for my two year old required more batteries than gifts for the rest of my family.
Pure electronic gifts are winning...
All of our kids are going to grow to be bigger geeks than we are.
AC
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:4, Insightful)
Geeks can think and imagine. You are turning you 2 year old into a person that has to have flashly lights to be entertained.
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:5, Insightful)
In the heyday of Lego, (late 1980's-early 1990's IMHO) you had a few specialized parts and mostly rather generic parts. You could build many different things out of a kit, sometimes even coming up with things better that what the kit was intended for. For example, I was able to build a church for my Lego town out of leftover castle parts.
Now it's all specialized crap. You can only build one thing that looks halfway decent. What's the fun in that?
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:5, Informative)
Tellingly, the Make and Create sets are apparently a bright spot for the company; reportedly they're among the few things they do really well, which seems to indicate their customers do indeed want general, nonspecialized sets that encourage imaginative, free-form building and unguided play as much as possible (though I do know one of the Harry Potter sets was apparently their biggest seller last year, but I guess that's an aberration). If nothing else, those sets also have some of the better price/piece ratios among all their current offerings...
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:3, Informative)
The price of LEGO has indeed gone up over the years, it's true; so have the prices of cars, peanut butter, shirts, and most other things. LEGO is just as vulnerable to the effects of inflation and other economic phenom
Re:Mindstorm no more! (Score:5, Informative)
I've never tried their robotics kits, but it may be just what you're looking for. Eight digital inputs, two analog inputs, and four motor outputs. Also the quality of the gears, motors and structural pieces blows Legos away. Price is expensive, but not outrageously so. In the same ballpark as Mindstorms.
Can't feel much sympathy for them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Too Specialized (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time to go back to castles and space ships and cities.
Or Rokenbok (Score:3, Interesting)
Rokenbok [rokenbok.com] is pretty cool too. My son (and I) get very creative with it.
It's like an Erector set, combined with wireless remote control vehicles, and chutes and hoppers for moving little plastic balls around. It's hard to explain until you've seen [rokenbok.com] it. Some people really take it to extremes. [rokenbok.com]
It's pretty expensive, though. We have spent over $1000 on all our sets and vehicles.
-ccm
Re:Can't feel much sympathy for them. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can't feel much sympathy for them. (Score:3, Insightful)
Green Lego Base [amazon.com]
$7 for a 10 inch square plastic base??!?
I shudder to think how much my parents paid for all the legos that I had when I was a kid. Then again, maybe they were not so expensive back then (70s).
The other reason... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got a mass of lego that's 20 years old hidden away in a box. It's still perfectly servicable. SOME of that set is a generation older. Why would I bug a new set for my kids, when I have them? The product is too durable, I think, for it's own good.
Re:Can't feel much sympathy for them. (Score:3, Interesting)
We must be talking about two different kinds of lego.
I could hit up the Toy store and get a "box o' lego", consisting of about 250 pieces for about 14.95 (ballpark). No harry potter, no special pieces, just good ol dimpled rectangular fun.
BoldAC nailed it. This isn't because lego "turned it's back" on anyone, this is because a product such as mi
Re:Lego cost (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I've seen other packages mention other countries, though, including Mexico, but from my quick, admittedly unscientific survey it definitely appears the majority of bricks come from just three countries, none of which is one I'd guess is particularly cheap to manufacture stuff in. Might the company do well to move some of its production to other countries that can make it for lower cost (without sacrificing quality, of course)? I can't believe they'd ever completely abandon Denmark as a main production locale, but do they need to manufacture everything in expensive countries? Could they not do some of their manufacturing to their standards elsewhere?
Don't forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus Lego is Danish for "play well"
Just a few Lego facts.
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)
Plus Lego is Danish for "play well"
Almost. It's a contraction of "leg godt" which is the Danish for "play well." (not in a well, that's dangerous, kids!)
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Informative)
The company's name was coined by Christiansen in 1934, from the Danish phrase "leg godt", meaning "play well". It is a myth that the word also means "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin. "Lego" is in fact a Latin word, but it means "I read".
Re:Don't forget... (Score:3, Funny)
And I believe the assertive form has the suffix "my eggo".
Sorry, just had to say it.
Go out and buy them before their gone! (Score:5, Interesting)
Great stuff, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Get back to ordinary bricks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Get back to providing big bags of ordinary bricks, and encourage creativity!
Jolyon
Re:Get back to ordinary bricks! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, no, you can't do that! That might lead to independent thought and stuff!
But seriously, I remember playing with Legos sans specialist bricks, as well as with Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, and the such. And then I see the toys today. Are kids so less creative now that "traditional" Legos are too great a challenge?
I agree: too much cutomization (Score:5, Insightful)
1) costs much to produce
2) contains less ordinary pieces to reduce the costs
3) Since it contains less pieces and the ones it contains are custom, there's very little play value to justify the cost.
I would suggest Lego to:
1)reduce custom pieces. Kids are suppose to have fantasy you know... I remember I put two triangles together and pretend it was a star destroyer...
2)kill most of the cinema stuff. Starwars stuff is ok (meaning it's well done and designed). reduce cutom pieces and completely kill the other series ( If they can't make other movies with the same quality, then it's a no go.)
3)Kill bionicles!!!! (what in the world are those things? are they LEGO at all? and they DO contain very few pieces and they're mostly custom!!!! They're model kits, not LEGO!)
4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?
Anyway, probably Lego is facing the usual toy VS digital dilemma where most of the kids don't want dull toys and prefer videgames... anyway, I really believe the company isn't facing the crisis for the good... A few steps in the same direction and Lego is gone.
Re:Get back to ordinary bricks! (Score:5, Informative)
Such a shame :-( (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure the price of these toys is the problem. Toys in general aren't exactly cheap these days. Neither are video games, and video games seem to be what is the most appealing to children these days. So what we might need to look into is why expensive video games are more interesting than expensive toys where children have to actually think to use them. Or did I just answer my own question?
Maybe they wouldn't loose so much Money... (Score:5, Funny)
At the very least, they could outsource the playing with Legos to India!
specialization (Score:5, Insightful)
Youngsters... (Score:4, Funny)
When I was a kid, I bought Lego sets that just came with x number of assorted blocks with no theme whatsoever. That took REAL creativity. I don't even know if you can buy just plain ol' regular blocks anymore.
Lego is dead, long live Lego (Score:3, Insightful)
Just before christmass I walked into a newly found Lego store at Valley Fair Mall (popular luxury mall in San Jose) and was discusted by the choices offered. Crappy replica's of crappy movies and stories that would not add anything of value to a kid's Lego collection other then a bunch of unusable custom pieces. Let alone the rediculous prices.
Rethink your strategy Lego. What worked in the past will really work in the future, there is still time since there is still no competition!
Of course they lost money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course they lost money... (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean LEGO Technic?
That's being discontinued once and for all now too. LEGO, at least with respect to the retail sector, is choosing to put its focus back on the original core product, the building brick.
LEGO Dacta has been the educational division of LEGO for a very long time now, and there are distributers of
Visit my colleague's page on MINDSTORMS (Score:3, Informative)
His page, at http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/ [crynwr.com], discusses the internals in great detail. You really won't believe how ADVANCED his knowledge is, so you've gotta check it out for yourself.
The page contains EVERYTHING about these amazing toys. I can't believe they're being discontinued. It's probably due to kids having too many activities (to beef-up their resumes) and videogames/television/radio taking up their time. No one sits down anymore to spend quality time with their family and build toys like these Mindstorms. We all have our own schedules and stuff, and it's probably NOT good for America in the long term.
Anyway, sorry to jade off a bit there, but here are some other links from my friend's page:
1) Create a Spider Robot [homepage.dk]
2) LEGO MINDSTORMS Group official SDK [lego.com]
Enjoy these links and much more on Russ's page! I helped him with the HTML code
Re:Visit my colleague's page on MINDSTORMS (Score:3, Informative)
are you sure ? the page says that html was generated from LaTex !!!
No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
The Bionicle pieces can be mixed to create different monster-like-critters (She's even created a six-legged beastie). They have a variety of gears and rubberbands that can be used with other pieces to articulate those things. And, of course, there are opportunities to mix different realms (Bionicle & K'nix or marble runs or even MindStorms).
Kids aren't limited by the intended packaging of this th
Too specialized (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a kid, there were very few specialized blocks. Even the railroad kit didn't have any except for the lego motor modules (I have always had a soft heart for the 70's-era motor modules) and the railroad tracks. Even the railroad track ties were standard 8x2 thin blocks.
In those days the vast majority of legos were sold in generic kits. You could even get small boxes of 50 or 100 generic blocks, up through the large 400 and 600 and 1000 block kits. All generic. They'd come with a little booklet of suggestions but the possibilities were endless.
The 70's-era house kits had doors, windows, and roof blocks all of which tied in with standard blocks. You could build a wall of doors or use an architectural door in your Moon Rover. You could use your roof blocks to make an Aztec pyramid.
Now you buy a little kit for, say, a TIE fighter and it costs $20 and there's not much you can build with it except things that look a hell of a lot like TIE fighters. The big generic kits aren't even sold any more; if they were they'd probably cost $1,000 and nobody would buy them.
Lego should go back to making the generic kits, price them reasonably, and let the kids think of stuff to build themselves again.
Re:Too specialized (Score:3, Interesting)
For some reason, my mother never got me new batteries when the original set died.
showing their age (Score:5, Interesting)
wireless (802.11x or cell)
a linux based os (of course)
more sophisticated moving parts
cooler ai modules...
I definitely think that there is a market out there for such a product.
Re:showing their age (Score:4, Interesting)
* wireless (802.11x or cell)
* a linux based os (of course)
* more sophisticated moving parts
* cooler ai modules..."
Or more specifically:
* Lots more outputs, lots more motors (solenoids, electromagnets, lights, LEDs) in the box.
* Li-ion rechargeable batteries
* Radio-control, possibly from your PC.
* Webcam (after all, who will buy it if it can't be used to make a climbing or flying spy-device?)
Play methods (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about 20 years ago, but 35 years ago I used to play with plain rectangular Lego blocks and generic wheels. I had to use my own mind and imagination to assemble these general-purpose blocks into the wide variety of things I wanted to build.
From the look of today's Lego sets, children play today by using the custom single-purpose pieces to assemble a verbatim copy of the picture on the box.
They Don't Care About Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
What does this have to do with their financial success? A lot, IMHO. It certainly has affected our brand loyalty. As Kewl as Bionicles are, we have tried to steer our boyz towards products made by more consumer friendly companies, such as K'nex.
I know there's more to running a company, but this to me says they still Just Don't Get It.
Mark
Why in my day... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure Mindstorm Lego people must have some similar tails to tell, and await a few replies.
Indicative of a trend? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one who has noticed that Lego barely sells a kit (in stores) that require any effort or concentration to complete?
When I was younger (here we go....), toy stores always had a great selection of the classic Technics kits. The large, complicated kits seemed to be the hottest items, because they were *challenging* and *interesting*.
Today, most of the sets I see are low-piece count, over-simplifed, plug-the-head-into-the-pelvic-chassis Bionicle garbage, which seems only to make the statement that kids today aren't interested in anything unless it's presented as a completely non-cerebral AARRRGGGHHH-type of monster package.
This really is a shame. I'll never stop appreciating the endless hours I spent creating machines of every type imaginable, and can't help but to think that my exposure to Lego helped to form a little bit of who I am today.
I don't know what a childhood of building Bionicles might do to kid, expect possibly make them wish their parents were cool enough to buy them a toy that doesn't require assembly, like the kid next door.
And that's a sad thing
Unholy deals with corporations (Score:3, Informative)
Corps overvalue their own IP, while everyone else's IP is theirs to exploit.
Mindstorms for 401K (Score:3, Funny)
3 things (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Price - wow. Am I stunned when I see legos in the store now. Multiple hundreds of dollars. The most expensive kit I owned as a kid was 60 bucks for the lastest and bestest. Which leads me to...
2. The kits themselves. I got Technics as a kid and made *everything* with them. The manuals were thick, had many different things you could make with them. Now - the kits are one project. There's no imagination to them. My 60 dollar kit was a red dump truck. It had the frame of a windshield - imagination filled in the rest. Now the windshield comes with the set. Who needs to stretch their thinking? I liked it when *I* made the choice of what the pieces were for.
3. Bionicles. Ironically, that brought legos to my attention (free toy at Burger World), but when I investigated, it was lousy. Hey look, I put this part here and *nowhere* else. Isn't the reason behind legos being able to place a piece wherever you want it? Gahh.
Put all these together, and what do you have? Someone who would like to buy legos, but the kits I want aren't around. I'd love to use legos in a more industrial manner (say building a case for something) but the basic sets are few and far between.
Three things that keep me from busting out my legos:
1. Cats.
2. Cat hair. (I can just imagine it sticking out of the seams and it makes me freak :)
3. Not enough room/time to mess with them. House is too small after the holidays and time is always short. Not like the halcyon days of my youth.
LEGO! Go back to the basics! Give us the old Technic sets, the massive 'generic' kits. Fire the Bionicle guy. You are digging your own grave. The more specialized you make your toys, the more people will just buy toys that are already 'done'. And that was never the point in the first place.
BTW - No. I won't sell any of my extensive collection of Technics or my wonderful zillion piece basic set. If ever there was something to be buried with, its my legos. You can try and pry them out of my cold, dead hands, but look out for the transforming watchdog I just made. His mouth moves and he's looking at you.
The death of Lego? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe [lego.com]. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
Official Word From LEGO (Score:5, Interesting)
NOT too specialized (Score:3, Interesting)
Where does it say Mindstorms is gone? (Score:4, Informative)
So until someone explicitly tells me the Mindstorms line is done, I'm not going to hold out any hope for seeing it in the clearance aisle.
Re:Where does it say Mindstorms is gone? (Score:5, Informative)
But LEGO Dacta, the educational division of LEGO will still sell Mindstorms stuff. Pitsco is the distributor of LEGO Dacta in the USA, and will sell to anyone anywhere within an area that isn't already serviced by another regional LEGO Dacta supplier.
Hope this doesn't mean more Bionicles (Score:3, Insightful)
I was not thrilled to see that my second grader brought home a Bionicles novella from the Scholastic book fair (which is increasingly a toy fair), especially after I looked at it and saw a grammatical error in the book's very first sentence. Lego has a whole mythology about Bionicles, and that's attractive to kids. But my son lost a couple essential pieces of his Bionicle within days of getting it, and I'm not going to encourage this overpriced, intellectually shallow, proprietary product line as a hobby.
Unfortunately, I could not find more generic Lego blocks in my Christmas shopping. There were some overpriced ($30-$40) Star Wars kits, and a space shuttle for $100, but nothing I wanted to buy. I'm beginning to associate Lego with brands like Scholastic and Disney, that have turned their once-respected product lines into brands of dumb, overpriced junk.
Oh, grow up (Score:3, Funny)
Legoland and the technic lego car (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition to that, another friend had the Technic lego car, with big wheels, cylinders, rack & pinion steering, suspension, etc. It ruled!
Where are those kits now? Relegated in favour of crappy Bionicles and Harry Potter themed kits. What can a child build with them? Bugger all, that's what!
Perhaps if they want their fortunes to improve, Lego should bring back the originals.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, how many parent think, "Little Jimmy should have a programmable set of Lego!"
TC Logo and Dacta were also great toys (one of my teachers wrote some of the documentation), but there just wasn't a big market.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Funny)
Every parent who is an engineer? At least I will when I have my own kids.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Interesting)
Overpriced is unfortunately right. (Score:4, Insightful)
I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.
On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs [cside.com] of Lego [fbtb.net] maniacs [ikros.net] out [thereverend.com] there [foundrydx.com] would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.
Re:Overpriced is unfortunately right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What happened? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Informative)
And each brick would have a lifetime of less than one year, developing cracks and warp. Of the 5 lb, at least 4 lb would be out-of-spec, either fit too loosely or too tight, and they would have sharp, annoying warts where they were carelessly ripped from the molding sprue. The color would vary extremely from batch to batch, be rather dull, and fade rapidly when exposed to the sun.
The problem with LEGO bricks is not that they are overpriced, but that they are overengineered. They are just too good. And quality is just not generally appreciated these days, especially when we're talking toys.
As a child, I had quite a few Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky cars, very accurate models, well made, often in England. Sure, you can still get those brands today, if you want to pay collector prices. The toy stores, at least here, abound with lousy chinese produced stuff, that breaks when you look too hard at it.
Mind you, many of my toys I had inherited from my older brothers. And many of my toys are still in such a good shape, that my son now continues to play with them. That's good for the customer, but it's just not good for sales: either kids inherit a toy (= no sale) or parents don't care about long life, and therefore buy cheaper toys.
I build plastic models (aircraft, military vehicles etc), and I can tell you that precisely molded plastic parts, even when they come in just one color and still attached to the sprue, as plastic model kits do, are *quite* expensive. *Even* when produced in China.
-Lasse
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
production moving to china (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What happened? (Score:3, Interesting)
As the father of a young child, I also wonder how much the lego clones have killed the market. Out of the many "lego" sets we have been givenas gifts, the majority of them are not official "lego" legos.
Davak
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course one of the Lego sets was missing several pieces, so they aren't without their problems.
Re:What happened? (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely. The quality of Megablocks is really piss-poor when compared to Lego. They have some excellent looking models, but the things won't stay together unless you use glue!
I can see how parents with no experience with Lego might look at the Megablocks and Lego side by side, and question why the Lego were so much more expensive, but after buying one set of the Megablocks, I can definitely say that I'd never do that again.
I think the big mistake Lego made was with the Bionicle and sports sets. Lego
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never, ever upgraded the platform (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too... (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, NQC and LegOS really rock. Many thanks to you who developed and maintained them!
Re:Me too... (Score:3, Insightful)
Small embedded processor running embedded OS. Maybe even compatible with old mindstorms programs. Small interpreter running on the OS for simple (kiddy) programs but otherwise full system call / thread / malloc power for the nerds.
What's more, it's an opportunity to fix some of the problems people complain about. Too expensive? Don't sell with high profit margins. They can't be that expensive to produce. Not enough io channels? Put more
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Informative)
One could only wish that they would license out the mindstorm excluseive items to be built and sold by someone else.
Vid Games (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vid Games (Score:3, Insightful)
raising children
definging your taste in music/movies
forming opinions on news events
Managing your Digital Rights
building things
repairing your own stuff (like electronics)
imagining (like video games, see parent post)
thinking (in general, welcome to the American way)
Unfortunatley, the someone/thing else are the co
Re:Vid Games (Score:3, Interesting)
My friend gets weekend visits with his 7-year old, and they usually end up over at my place on sundays. I have 2 giant boxes of Legos (some new, some vintage) and after playing monopoly or whatever, the kid always plays with the Legos, sometimes for hours.
Well, daddy bought the kid a PS2 for X-Mas, and guess what? No more interest in Legos. Hell, no more interest in Monopoly, for that matter. He just wants to play Tony Hawk or Simpsons Hit and Run. [shrug]
Re:Vid Games (Score:3, Insightful)
When everyone in your class is talking about how they found secret levels or cheats for game XY, or how they're all trying to beat "Ken's high score", or whatever - you're going to feel left out if you're just going home and playing around with your legos, instead of getting in on the gaming action.
If you think about it, most big "fads" in toys are due to achieving a "critical mass" of kids playing w
Re:Vid Games (Score:3, Insightful)
do you have kids with legos? have you been a kid with legos?
the big duplo blocks that are aimed at preschool kids don't really incite much imagination in themselves. but that age group really can exercise their imagination with... well, i'm amazed at what little they can use to exercise their imagination.
now on to the actual legos
Re:What happened? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
No (Score:4, Insightful)
Those little microcontrollers cost you 5$ at most if you buy a few 1000.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, the A64 3000 runs at 2Ghz with 512K cache.
But those little controlers, if you dont need 512K rom, you can get controllers for a few cent that could do the job. All you need are a few 10000 transistors, in a time where every gpu has 50 million+
Re:MindStorms (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
I mean, a microcontroller with three inputs and outputs, 32 kB RAM, and some ROM (512 kiB IIRC) has to cost at least $100
If you think that a microcontroller with 32kB RAM and 512 KB ROM costs >$100 you have never priced one. A microcontroller such as a PICmicro, an Atmel, a Zilog, and so on costs at most $10 for a "deluxe" version with about 30 I/O pins and Flash memory. What Lego is using is most likely a pre-programmed chip w/o Flash, which are about 1/3 of the price. A 512 KB FlashROM chip costs about $6. These are RETAIL prices, what you can get one single chip for. Lego probably gets them for a fraction of the price since they need quite a few of the things.
I am willing to bet that most of the money from the cost of a Mindstorms kit goes towards marketing and product development. Not towards manufacturing. I'm sure the software inside (and outside) the mindstorms thing cost much more to develop than the hardware.
Re:MindStorms (Score:3, Informative)
RCX Internals [stanford.edu] has details - the microcontroller is a Hitachi H8 job, HD6433292B02F, with a preprogrammed ROM and space for software.
It's not exactly rocket science either, AFAIK they got help from MIT with the design (MIT have a "Programmable Brick") but it's something that a fairly competant hobby hardware hacker with a copy of Eagle and etching kit (or even use somewhere like Olimex) could knock togeth
Re:MindStorms (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
Actually, with injection moulding the costs of making complicated moulds is very high compared to the cost of the actual plastic. So the fewer kits Lego makes from a certain mould the higher the price. And since expensive kits tend to sell less, well that just makes it even
Re:MindStorms (Score:3, Insightful)
-russ
Re:Mindstorms was awesome (Score:4, Informative)
So you don't play with Lego anymore that you are "grown up"? How sad
Re:Mindstorms was awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article Submiter Jumping to Conclusions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Article Submiter Jumping to Conclusions (Score:3, Informative)
The consensus is that LEGO probably will not stop production of Mindstorms, though they may drop from 'public' perception and possibly only be available through LEGO educations resellers like Pitsco Lego/Dacta [pldstore.com].
I will not mourn the loss of the Harry Potter and other movie tie-in crap. Sounds too much like MBA-fodder and not the genius that makes Lego what they are.
Re:Inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the main point of the lego mindstorms was to change the way kids learned... to make learning and playing the same.
The prototype for the mindstorms toy was built at the MIT media lab by roboticist Fred Martin [uml.edu]. (who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell at a budding robotics lab). Fred really wanted to know about how to use computing to educate kids, and lego offered a sum of money to the media lab in order to foster a new type of marketable toy that had "engaging computing" potential. So he built a lego brick with a computer inside, which was the base of the toy.
Interesting enough, Fred Martin also built the handyboard, which is a great way to get into amateur robotics. As shameless self-promotion, the work I did in Fred Martin's class can be found here [edgiardina.com].
Re:Sadly.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Star Wars did it (Score:3, Informative)
My money would be on the Harry Potter line being the kicker. The previous two years, the HP line did *VERY* well, but it clearly didn't do well this last year simply because there was no new Harry Potter film released to recapture the interest of the public. Star Wars merchandise in general has consistently sold well past the "hype period" that is commonly associated with movie merchandising, so it's unlikely that the LEGO Star Wars line itself was to b
Re:Has the copyright on Lego expired? (Score:5, Interesting)
It did, however, have a patent.
And yes, LEGO's patent has expired... at least with regards to the building brick. The patents on the Technic parts are still alive and well afaik.
Megabloks, a company that makes a building brick that is essentially compatible with LEGO, opened up shop almost to the day that LEGO's patent expired on the brick and has been slowly and steadily improving the quality of their own product ever since. They aren't half bad right now.
Re:NNNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because girls aren't supposed to build robots? Don't tell that to my six year old Natasha, whose favorite playtime is spent building K'Nex Battlemechs and Bandai Gundams with her dad.
1953 just called. They want their gender biases back.
Sheesh.
Re:NNNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, you'll be able to get the Mindstorms cheaper on eBay in the future. And all you need for a stop-action movie studio is a cheap ($30) digital camera, some normal Legos or action figures, some cardboard and crayons, and some software that turns a bunch of JPEGs into a movie.
Check out the Parallax line. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've worked with a number of their products and have found them to be well-designed and accompanied by clear, easy-to-comprehend instructions. And if you do get into a bind, their tech support is both informed and responsive. All-in-all, they're a top-notch company!