It's the Monday morning after Christmas weekend, and the office is almost utterly devoid of any signs of life. My stomach is full with the warmth of bad train station coffee, and a fresh cup sits at my desk. My mind is restless and in search of a mission – but not quite in the right frame of mind to take on any heavy lifting. This is the perfect sort of morning for a little light blogging to get the creative juices flowing.

Many people do product reviews on their blogs. I briefly considered doing some of my own, but I'm not sure if anybody really cares what I think of any of these gizmos, and I still feel a bit guilty at all the neat stuff I got for Christmas on a year when so many people have had to do without. Maybe I'll review my toys a little later on, especially since it will give me time to learn how to use them.

Instead, this morning I think I'll talk about one of the toys my son got this Christmas, the Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics set. (Specifically, this is Lego set #8527 for hardcore Lego fans.) The kit comes with all the basics that your little geek in training needs to build one of several possible robot toys. As the product description will tell you, it includes 3 motors, 4 sensors (light, sonar, sound, and touch/collision), a variety of Technic style building pieces, and what they call the Intelligent Brick – a computer with a modest amount of I/O and programmability that controls the other pieces via several cables.

For our family, the NKT set is a re-tread of a Christmas gift Eric got either last year or the year before. The kit suggests that it is for ages 10 and up, and in retrospect I am slightly inclined to disagree. Certainly Eric was capable of playing with the NXT two years ago, but even though he's an avid robot enthusiast, the first time through Eric made a couple of false starts at actually building the robot and had one fun session of playing with its programming features before finally losing interest in it.

By the time he eventually circled back to it again, he had rather predictably misplaced several of the major components, which he blamed on his four year old brother. This was disappointing, though not entirely unexpected. For others, I would suggest that you invest in some kind of organizing and carrying case, preferably with some kind of locking mechanism to keep little fingers out (if you have those around), since at $250 US this is not the kind of toy you want to have to buy twice if you can avoid it. (Sadly, this is exactly what we did.) I am leaning towards a good old fashioned tackle box like the kind your grandpa probably used to organize his fishing lures. That would have lots of little compartments for organizing and possible a loop for locking the box. A good one should have lids on the inside so turning it upside down won't spill its contents all over the place.

It seems I have a soft spot for little boys who dream of someday designing and building giant mecha for the Defense Department. Also, Eric's recent acquisition of my old Windows Mobile PDA phone (aka the T-Mobile MDA/HTC Wizard) is a perfect accessory to the NXT, since both sport a Bluetooth interface and Lego has graciously developed an API and a nifty programmable controller for the Pocket PC.

After some tedious sorting though literal Lego mountains, we were able to locate all but a few of the pieces from his previous set, most of which are large enough that we expect them to turn up in the next round of room cleaning. If this quest provides him any incentive towards that end, I will be both shocked and delighted. What kid wouldn't want to host their very own Battlebots competition? He'll need to find about six cables, a motor, and two sensors that went missing in order to have the entire second robot available.

This year was a much better experience than the previous one with regard to how well Eric was able to enjoy it. He has matured somewhat noticeably in the past year, though some of this may have to do with a change in his medication regimen which was also quite positive. Eric was able to correctly identify the Start Here box on his own and get going on the basic construction of the robot's core. For the most part he was almost completely autonomous. No doubt, failing all else, he has a promising career in Ikea furniture assembly. There were only a couple points where I had to step in to help – one where an axle and its accompanying hole required just enough extra English that even I was afraid I was pushing it too hard, and the other where the order of assembly made one wire practically impossible to insert without taking half the damn thing apart again. Eric also warns me that one of the pages in the instruction guide may have two steps reversed. Beyond that, Eric was able to do practically everything on his own (including installing and using the unit's programming software) with only minimal encouragement and occasional redirection, leaving me idle to search for the lost pieces of his older set.

In a few hours, Eric completed the Tri-bot, a three wheeled robot with a front facing claw for carrying little plastic balls. The design uses the touch sensor to detect if the ball is reachable, and a light sensor facing downward to detect if it has crossed the black border of its testing pad. Voice and ultrasound sensors provide additional flexibility. Following the instructions, Eric programmed the robot to retrieve a ball from a stand and carry it to the outside of the test pad where it would release it. I can already imagine a number of cool variants for this program even before I have done any research on my own to see what's already been done. Hopefully, he'll be equally inspired.

An extra $250 got us a rechargeable Lion battery pack, DC transformer, several alternative sensors (Compass, Heat/IR Seeker, Color, and Accelerometer), and a pile of extra cables. Of these, the battery pack is the most essential and money saving. I have noticed that the unit will quickly chew through six AA batteries, so an extra $60 will pay for itself quickly and prevent this expensive toy from becoming an unused waste of space. I can only imagine how many batteries he would consume using both "bricks". The other sensors are just "goodies", but they can greatly increase what the unit is capable of. Since we have two bricks, it made sense to add some diversity. I didn't waste any time on the IR Link, since we have a lot of Bluetooth devices and I want to see how far we can push that technology before resorting to the line-of-sight only IR.

Frugal Shoppers' Note: the K9833 includes the DC transformer and the battery and will save you a couple bucks, as I learned a few minutes too late. Or, if you haven't bought the base NXT yet, consider the NXT Education Base Set that includes the battery and a few extra sensors and cables for only ten bucks more than the retail NXT set. If I had it to do over, I would definitely go that way.

For the truly robot obsessed, I strongly recommend you take a visit over at Lego Education, where there are more advanced components and plenty of books. For an additional $260, you can get the super cool RFID Sensor and tags, an Infrared Ball, and a Touch Sensor Multiplexer. Of course, by this point you have probably depleted your child's college fund, but I believe it will be well worth it.

I went ahead and got the RFID to fulfill a promise I made to Eric when he first got the set, that if he built and programmed one robot with it I would go ahead and get some of the cool stuff he pointed out to me online. There's no way to know with kids if they'll have the attention span needed to make good use out of these things, but I'm hoping that he will. Considering the A+ he got in Cryptography back in November and all the work he needs to do in order to prepare for the SAT in a few weeks, it just seems fair to reward his hard work. Though now that I think about it, I've now sunk over a thousand dollars into what it ostensibly a child's toy. Either I'm completely insane or a genius. I suppose there's no reason it can't be both.

Maybe in future, Eric and I can do some cooperative blog posts about what we come up with together.