The consumer electronics market seems as though it would be an unlikely fit for National Instruments. Certainly it was never a market that the maker of software to automate test, control and design had considered pursuing.

But that was before opportunity knocked in 1998.  That was the year that Lego, the maker of the popular interconnecting plastic toy blocks came out with a new high tech toy for children that sparked the imagination of engineers and educators alike.

That was the year that Lego introduced Mindstorms, a toy that let children construct and program their own robots. But the toy was also embraced by the engineering community and by the education market. Since its introduction in 1998, the kit has become the best-selling product in the Lego Group’s history, according to the toy company.

After the toy kit came out, a professor at Tufts University, Chris Rogers, reverse engineered National Instruments’ software LabView so that it could be used to program the Lego robotics system. Rogers brought his work to the Lego Group and the Lego Group approached NI, according to Ray Almgren, VP of product marketing and academic relations at NI.

And while Lego’s commercial product, Mindstorms, was already on the market and had been packaged with another programming application, National Instruments worked with Lego to create an application based on LabView for the Mindstorms education version – one geared to the school market.

 “To some extent this fell in our lap,” said Almgren.  “We all looked at each other like, ok, this is a little different, it but seems like the right thing to do. We knew immediately it was the right thing to do.”

National Instruments contributed the programming element to Lego’s RoboLab, the version of Mindstorms designed for the education market.  Since its initial release in June 1999  the robotics kit has been translated into 17 languages.

While the kit was primarily marketed to the middle school market, because it was based on LabView, RoboLab became one of the primary tools used in Introduction to Engineering courses at the university level, said Almgren. And it became popular at high schools, too.  And it became a “tool of choice to inspire kids at summer camp,” an extra plus at a time when science education in the United States is viewed as struggling.

But while the educational version of Mindstorms has included software based on LabView since 1999, the commercial version of the product did not include NI’s programming tool.

That changed this month at the Consumer Electronics Show when the Lego Group announced an updated version of Mindstorms. The new version which will be now be available to everyone, not just schools,  includes programming software based on LabView.

The new version is more intuitive and easier to use than the 1999 version, Almgren said.  It is designed to enable a middle school student to create and program a robot within 30 minutes. 

The new version also takes advantage of the direct connection most PCs now have to the Internet, enabling users to access libraries of models and see what other people have created, Almgren said.

“It’s a beautiful interface for the kids,” said Almgren. “It’s almost like putting Lego blocks together when you are writing the software.”

And while this doesn’t represent a major source of revenue for NI – the software itself as available from Lego is just $60 – it gets NI’s software in the hands of the world’s future engineers, said Almgren.  And that represents an investment in the future of the company, well beyond what next quarter’s numbers will show.

By: DocMemory
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