Robots are hard to build from scratch unless you have degrees in engineering and programming. That's what makes LEGO's Mindstorms sets so amazing. They're flexible robotics kits that combine sensors, motors, and an electronic brain with LEGO Technic components to make robots anyone can build. LEGO has stepped up its robotics game with its newest Mindstorms product. Over four years since the launch of its Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit, the company has released LEGO Mindstorms EV3. This $349.99 (direct) robotics kit is faster, smarter, and more flexible than the previous version, and stands as one of the best ways to dabble in robotics without investing in tools. Its price tag might seem like a lot for a toy, but it's much more than that; LEGO Mindstorms EV3 is a remarkably powerful and functional robotics kit people of any age can use to build some impressive and complicated projects.

Contents

For your $350, you get the Mindstorms EV3 Intelligent Brick (the "brain" of the Mindstorms EV3 set), an infrared remote control, three servo motors, a color sensor, a touch sensor, an infrared sensor, and 550 LEGO Technic pieces. The 550 bricks and other building components might not seem like a lot against the nearly 3,000 pieces of the $320 LEGO Sydney Opera House Creator set, but you're mostly paying for the robotic parts. In fact, the Intelligent Brick itself would cost $150 separately, and each other robotic component can be purchased piecemeal for $20 (servo motors, touch sensor) to $50 (infrared sensor).

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Since this is a LEGO Technic set with a robotic heart, you can use any of your standard LEGO or LEGO Technic components with the set. That's one of the great things about LEGO: universal backwards compatibility. In fact, with a few small exceptions (six big sword/scale pieces, a handful of curved, white cover pieces, and a few specific mechanical pieces), all of the bricks that come with the set are universal and could be turned into nearly everything (a feature not seen very often with complex, licensed building sets for series like Star Wars or The Hobbit). The set doesn't have any exact dimensions because it's over 500 different pieces, but you can build a robot about the size of a shoebox and have it still be structurally sound. Of course, you can also get more LEGO parts and build a robot as large as you'd like, as long as the moving parts are still light enough and have enough leverage for the servos to move them.

The Intelligent Brick

As the brain of the kit, the Mindstorms EV3 Intelligent Brick features a ton of connection features. It has eight Mindstorms connection cable ports (modified RJ12 ports with the plastic tab on the right side of the jack), a mini-USB port for connecting to your computer, a microSD card slot for expanding the memory, and a full-size USB port for an optional Wi-Fi dongle or daisy-chaining up to three additional Mindstorms EV3 Intelligent Bricks for a total of 32 connection ports—useful if you want to build a much more complicated and expensive robot than the kit allows on its own. The Intelligent Brick also features built-in Bluetooth for directly controlling your robot with your mobile device and the Mindstorms iOS or Android app. The top of the brick holds a monochrome LCD display, four direction buttons, a back button, and a confirmation button on the top, and the right side of the brick holds a small speaker for playing sound files.

The Mindstorms EV3 Intelligent Brick uses an ARM9-based processor with 16MB of memory (and storage expandable exponentially with the microSD card slot). This is a massive leap in power from the ARM7-based Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Intelligent Brick, which only 256KB of memory and no microSD card slot. The NXT 2.0 Intelligent Brick had Bluetooth, but it was only Bluetooth 2.0 compared to the EV3 Intelligent Brick's Bluetooth 4.0, and couldn't be used to directly control your creations.

The sensors have also gotten a power upgrade, and are able to send new values to the EV3 Intelligent Brick 1,000 times per second, three times more often than the NXT 2.0 sensors. The color sensor can also now detect seven colors instead of six and has a Reflected Light mode that removes background light. All of these upgrades mean your robots can be much more complex than with Mindstorms NXT 2.0.

One of the biggest additions to Mindstorms EV3, thanks to the more advanced Intelligent Brick, is Bluetooth control from your mobile device. The LEGO Mindstorms Commander app for iOS and Android includes preset control panels for all five robots you can build in the 3D Builder app. More importantly, it lets you create manual control panels for your own creations, with different buttons, switches, and displays available to control motors and check sensor inputs. The Bluetooth control works directly with the Intelligent Brick without requiring you to program anything, so it can work both as a remote control and a test bench for seeing if your mechanisms function during construction. It's an extremely useful feature.

Building and Programming

Building and Programming

The set only comes with the printed instructions and on-board programming to make the most basic demo robot, the TRACK3R, a simple wheeled robot with tank treads and a spinning claw on the front. Fortunately, LEGO offers free plans for several other Mindstorms robots both created by the company and designed by the community on its Web site. The free LEGO 3D Builder iOS and Android app provides direct instructions with animated construction diagrams for building different robots like the SPIK3R walking mech and the R3PTAR snake.

You can program the Mindstorms EV3 Intelligent Brick through your computer, using a USB connection and LEGO's Mindstorms EV3 software. The software includes building instructions for several robots, along with programming files for each robot (only the TRACK3R's file is preinstalled on the brick). Loading the R3PTAR's files to the brick was as easy as opening the RE3PTAR project file and clicking the transfer button. However, these are only the most basic, educational functions of the software and the Mindstorms EV3 set itself.

After you've gotten the hang of the set by building a few robots and looking at their programming files, you can start your own programming project from scratch. This can be very daunting when you realize just how much you can do with it, but the software does everything it can to make it seem more accessible. The Mindstorms EV3 programming language is a modified version of National Instruments' LabVIEW software used for programming measurement and control systems. Every motor, sensor, and logic operation is represented by a colored icon, and the entire process is essentially one large, complex if-then chart. You can build chains and loops of predetermined actions based on direct input from you or the input of any connected sensors. Each icon has numerous options to tweak, and the entire system is surprisingly powerful. You can even program your robot to send manual data values between bricks for more complicated actions.

Projects and Conclusion

My actual experiments with LEGO Mindstorms EV3 are explored in another story, but for this review I'll just focus on how the set works out of the box and following instructions. I built the TRACK3R tank robot in about an hour, and after that I built the R3PTAR robot in about two hours (a two-"mission" process to build the slithering body and then the biting head). Both robots worked perfectly; the built-in program on the Intelligent Brick let the TRACK3R run automatically and respond to the infrared remote, and the R3PTAR functioned and responded to my remote commands as soon as I uploaded and ran the premade program files from the Mindstorms software. In both cases, the instructions were simple, direct, and demonstrated just a few of the very clever mechanical and programming things you can do with the set.

LEGO Mindstorms EV3 continues LEGO's trend of making accessible, functional robotics kits for beginners who have already spent years playing with LEGO bricks. The new upgrades add new communications functionality and vastly expanded memory and processing power, and the direct Bluetooth control adds a new way to direct your robots besides the small infrared remote and programming actions. The core appeal of Mindstorms is still here, and in force: It's an accessible, intuitive way to get into robotics without investing a lot of money. Its $350 price tag might seem like a lot compared to even other LEGO kits, but when you consider just what you can do with it or what it can help teach your kids, it well earns its keep. Whether you're an amateur roboticist yourself or want to give your children a chance to be high-tech prodigies with their building blocks, LEGO Mindstorms EV3 is a fantastic kit.

Artboard Created with Sketch. LEGO Mindstorms EV3 5.0 Editors' Choice See It $342.65 at Amazon Canada MSRP $349.99 Pros Remarkably flexible and powerful.

Expanded memory and Bluetooth control welcome upgrades.

Accessible to people of all ages. Cons Expensive.

Small number of servos and sensors included mean projects will either be limited or require additional investment. The Bottom Line The LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit is the newest, best, and most accessible way to teach your kids or yourself how to build and program robots.

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