For Christmas, I treated myself to the LEGO Mindstorms Education Set 45544. It’s no longer available new, as LEGO has decided to discontinue the Mindstorms series. I had a Mindstorms set before, but at that time my daughter wasn’t so excited about it, so I ended up selling it again. However, that was an older version. I bought this Education version from (eBay) Classifieds; the seller was very nice, but unfortunately, he didn’t seal the box, so the lid came off during shipping, and some parts were lost through the not-so-tight packaging. What a shame.
The topic of robots is everywhere with the boys, so why not play with it, even though this set is more for older kids? Of course, it’s not a future-proof investment if LEGO eventually stops maintaining the software, as they did with my old set, but this EV3 also works great with Python. However, we built the first model using the LEGO software.
The set includes, in addition to many bricks:
- The EV3 computer brick with 4 inputs and outputs for motors and 4 inputs and outputs for sensors
- 2 large motors
- 1 medium motor
- 1 color sensor
- 1 gyro sensor
- 2 touch sensors
- 1 infrared sensor
After some testing with the sensors, a tutorial walks you through building the first model, a small robot that moves forward, then backward, and so on.
The programming is done using drag-and-drop modules on the iPad or computer, which are connected to the brick via Bluetooth.
That was, of course, a bit boring. So, in the second version, we added a color sensor that makes the robot start moving when it detects a red brick. Then, we added a touch sensor so that the robot only reverses if it bumps into something in front. However, this only works if the touch sensor is directly facing an obstacle. So, we quickly built another version that uses the infrared sensor. If the distance is less than 15 centimeters, the robot moves back a bit, turns 90 degrees, and then drives straight ahead again. This worked really well.
This robot somewhat resembles Wall-E with its infrared sensor eyes. Very cute.
Actually, we have very specific ideas about what we want to build with the robot set. On one hand, we want to build a Connect Four machine. We once saw something like that at a flea market, unfortunately not for sale, but building it ourselves is much more fun anyway. On the other hand, at a children’s sound festival, we saw a machine that can read painted strips of paper and generate music from them. That’s exactly what our next project is going to be.