Lego Mindstorms EV3 (Robot building kit) will be launched in August, 2013

People have been waiting for this for some time since Lego announced it a few months ago. 

It is known that  Lego Mindstorms EV3 , the latest version among Mindsorms series will be available for customers in August 2013.

New version has got improvements over the previous NXT 2.0 and is assessed to be worth the money at $350

Price: approx $350 (Detailed specifications are given at the bottom of this Post.)

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If you are a hobbyist or student, you will find it exciting. It is not very complex to make some robotic applications out of this kit, I would say easy it is. In case, if you happened to be a real talented one you may find it out building some complex robotic applications too. Mindstorms can be programmed through the stock kit as well as other tools such as Microsoft Robotics Studio.

One of the categories of people who is interested in this, apart from students and general hobbyists are computer programmers who seem to have a sense of Mechanical Systems and want to try it out with Mindstorms. There has been so many interesting applications built out of these kits. You can see some sample applications built using the previous version of mindstorms Kit , Mindstorms NXT 2.0 in below videos.

Rubics Cube Solver:

Sudoku Solver:

Specifications

EV3 Intelligent Brick

• Stronger and faster ARM9 robotic processor
• Embedded 16MB FLASH memory
• 64 MB RAM plus SD expansion slot
• LINUX operating system, released under open source
• USB 2.0 interface allows for WiFi connectivity
• 4 input ports: Connect up to 4 sensors at the same time, including your NXT sensors
• 4 output ports: Now you can power up to 4 motors (Either Large, Medium or NXT)
• Up to four intelligent bricks to be connected together (Yes, that’s 16 sensor and 16 motor ports!)
• Matrix display with loudspeaker
• Button interface with status indication
• Enhanced on-brick programming
• Bluetooth ® v2.1
• iOS and Android compatible

Hardware

• 3 Interactive Servo Motors: 2 large and 1 medium
• 1 Touch Sensor
• New IR Seeker Sensor measures distance, movements and detects objects, and acts as a receiver for the remote control
• New IR Beacon remotely controls robot from up to 2 meters (6 feet) away
• Improved Color Sensor detects 6 colors as well as the brightness of light sources
• Backwards-compatible with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT: Connect your NXT Sensors and motors to the new EV3 brick.
• Assortment of 594 LEGO TECHNIC® elements for easy, more stable building with improved functionality and movement capabilities

Programming Software

• Downloadable software is PC and Mac compatible
• Icon-based drag and drop environment for “building” programs with new interactive content that helps de-bug programming