Lego Compatibility

Recently, many users of the Lego Mindstorms kits have been somewhat frustrated by new versions of the products.

You see, Lego Mindstorms has seen three releases:

  • Lego Robotics Invention System (RIS), which was released in 1998
  • Lego Mindstorms, released 2006
  • Lego Mindstorms 2.0, released late 2009

The RIS and Mindstorms series are very different. With many changes making it easier for kids to construct bespoke robots.

However, many 1.0 users were expecting to build the 2.0 robots using nothing but the 1.0 kit parts. It’s all a bit silly if you ask me - forward and backward compatibility with robotics kits isn’t something you’d expect. How can anyone innovate if you have to support the past, present and future?

The difficult thing with Lego these days is the availability of parts. You can’t simply walk into a store, jump onto eBay, or log onto the lego.com store and buy spare parts for the Mindstorms kits.

Sure, they have a few pieces, but I’ve been looking for particular cogs and parts for a long time now, and without them, I haven’t been able to build models uploaded by users to blogs, youtube and other parts of the web.

To be honest, I’ve been quite amazed at how well Lego has stood the test of time. They’re constantly evolving to remain relevant with the introduction of the console games, the pending MMORPG(which I’m pretty excited about), the Lego Builder(which allows you to build models on your PC/Mac in 3D and buy the parts needed to construct your creation), and more modern kits like the Mindstorms series.

I can only imagine the complexities of implementing a ‘complete’ online store which stocks all the Lego bits and pieces, but it would easily solve many of the complaints of long time Lego hobbyists.

Lego is definitely a brand worth watching. I wonder what they’ll build next.

</rant>