Acknowledgments
This book is the result of a crazy idea I had in mid-1998, when I first heard that the Robotics Invention System was coming. LEGO robots sounded like something O'Reilly readers would like to
play with—why not write a book about them? I'd like to thank Mike Loukides and Tim O'Reilly for having the vision to believe in this book. Thanks to Mike, again, for excellent help and
feedback.
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I'd like to thank my parents for buying me LEGO sets when I was a kid. Did you ever expect something like this?
Many thanks go to my wife, Kristen, for helping to create this book. She first suggested its project-oriented organization; she gave me excellent feedback on many of its chapters; she got me
RolyKits to help organize my pieces; she is able to keep a straight face when we tell people I'm writing a book about LEGO robots; she stayed up late nights helping me finish the book.
I'm grateful to my daughter, Daphne, who finally believes that building LEGO robots is part of my job. ''Want to see Daddy," she said one day. Kristen explained, "No, no, sweetheart, Daddy's
working right now." With tears in her eyes, Daphne said, "Daddy's not working. Daddy play LEGOs." Someday, I promise, I'll let Daphne play with the whole set, not just the bendy purple things.
And thanks to my sons, Luke and Andrew, just for being great guys. You can build robots someday too, if you wish.
The building instructions in this book were a special challenge. I first sketched out the building instructions with photos from a digital camera. Once these were finished, Kristen took over 475
photographs with a regular camera. We selected the best and sent them off to the O'Reilly illustration department. These photographs were scanned in and meticulously touched up, cropped,
edited, and manipulated to produce the instructions that you see in the book. I owe many thanks to Rob Romano for his hard work on these instructions.
This book has had an excellent set of technical reviewers. Ralph Hempel, Todd Lehman, Russel Nelson, Suzanne Rich, John Tamplin, ActivMedia Robotics (
http://www.activrobots.com/), and
Ben Williamson provided insightful and authoritative feedback on a draft of this book. Thanks also to Stephan Somogyi for encouraging me to include more information about using a Macintosh
with MINDSTORMS.
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1
Welcome to MINDSTORMS
In this chapter:
• What Is a Robot?
• Mobile Robots
• What Is MINDSTORMS?
• What Now?
• Online Resources
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