I have fond memories of spending entire weeks programming the old Mindstorms NXT kits for an infamous undergrad ECE course at McGill... It's strange that Lego markets this so heavily towards children when there's more than enough complexity to keep a team of (adult) engineers having fun for months on end.

Since then, I've always wanted to buy myself one, but the steep price tag has been holding me back. Still, Lego's design and product quality is superb, so now that there's a brand new set of hardware coming out at the same price point I just might bite the bullet.

Wow, nicely done Lego. Watching the evolution of this from Dr. Martin's "smart brick" to today has been quite interesting. I've got one of the original Mindstorms kits, this always struck me as an awesome way to get started in embedded systems work, I hope Lego continues a tradition of being 'hacker friendly' in the sense of allowing direct coding to the device.

This looks superb, I can't wait to upgrade my NXT kit.