June 4, 2006
The Real Story behind MINDSTORMS
Wired has a nice article on the development of the new version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS. It shows the odd mix of fanatacism, personality, and pure talent that makes a good engineering story.
Posted by elkaim at June 4, 2006 11:50 PM
He guessed it had something to do with Mindstorms, Lego's programmable robotics kit. After all, he's a master at assembling the plastic bricks into complex robots, like his wheeled, self-balancing machine dubbed the LegWay, and he's something of a celebrity in the Mindstorms world. But there hadn't been a Mindstorms update in nearly four years, and rumor had it Lego might abandon the product altogether.
Intrigued, Hassenplug signed the NDA, received a username and password, and was ushered to a secure online forum. Even there, he found no official information - just an email thread between a few peers: John Barnes, David Schilling, and Ralph Hempel. Hassenplug knew them well from Brickfest, the annual conference where Lego zealots show off their most elegant creations, from massive starships and richly detailed cathedrals to giant bipedal robots. The four Mindstorms experts speculated as to why they'd been tapped and sworn to secrecy. Lego probably needed beta testers for a Mindstorms update.
After lurking for a few days, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, dropped in on the conversation. He told the crew that a revamped kit was, in fact, in the works. But Lego didn't even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design. "I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too," recalls Barnes, an electronics engineer from Holland Patent, New York. "We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined."
Over the next 11 months, right up to the January launch of Mindstorms NXT at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the four men were de facto Lego employees. They exchanged countless emails with Lund and his team, reeling off ideas for new sensors, redesigned input ports, and stabilized firmware. The MUPers also met with Lund at Brickfest in the US and at Lego's Denmark headquarters to hash out specs for the computer that serves as the brain of every Mindstorms creation.
The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. "Pretty much the comment from all four of us was 'They're going to talk to us about Legos, and they're going to pay us with Legos?'" Hassenplug says. "'They actually want our opinion?' It doesn't get much better than that."