Random set of the day: Exploration Mars
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 9736 Exploration Mars, released in 2000. It's one of 5 Mindstorms sets produced that year. It contains 155 pieces, and its retail price was US$50.
It's owned by 566 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
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On the same day of 31107's review. About exploration of Mars. With an alien...
Coincidence? I think not. I want to believe.
Great box art. Shows what you get really clearly.
Contains: 1 piece (all of Mars)
This set was such a disappointment. But in fact it was not due to the set itself; it was due to the limitations of the Mindstorm brick. To build any meaningful rover you need significantly more ports. At least six actuators; two for movement and direction (either two driving sides or one driving and one steering). On top of that plaform you need an apparatus to do some work which will need 3 degrees of freedom to move on all axis and another one to do that actual work (i.e. some sort of grabber or other device). Coupled to that you will need even more sensors to measure up all those movements with some accuracy and then some other sensors to measure the environment variables. So twelve ports should be a minimum for a proper "intelligent" brick. We are getting there: the control+ system can control 4 devices (either actuator or sensor) and it has integrated accelerometer and axis sensors. You can somewhat link a few of them together to build something potentially useful. Since the motors (actuator) are half intelligent (i.e. they know their position) it is like they are both actuator and sensor at the same time. With just 2 control+ brick linked together, you can possibly build a very capable rover (6 actuators with the associated sensors for positioning and two free ports for other "experiment" sensors). The only thing we need now is a camera that can broadcast back to an android device and we will have something quite powerful.
The graphic designers must have had fun with that. Just take a photo of the backyard dug up and yea, that looks like Mars.
@namekuji said:
"The graphic designers must have had fun with that. Just take a photo of the backyard dug up and yea, that looks like Mars."
2000 was a time when Lego was borderline bankrupt. Even the cardboard of these boxes was so thin they would "bruise" just looking at them - worst offender for that was the Mindstorm Droid Kit. If it would not have been for SW (and to a lesser extent Bionicles), maybe Lego would have been a thing of the past...
I had to check the instructions to see what this set is about. Suffice to say this is a set that I won't miss not getting.
^^Uh, more like, "If it would not have been for BIONICLE (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Star Wars), maybe LEGO would have been a thing of the past". LEGO Star Wars had been around for two years before BIONICLE came out and LEGO's fortunes weren't getting really any better. BIONICLE came along and pioneered the turnaround since all the profits went to LEGO without them having to shuck some change for the licensing fee to Lucasfilm's way. The CEO of LEGO at the time even later went on to say that it was really BIONICLE that saved the company. Since LEGO is privately owned and operated, I would imagine JVK wouldn't make a statement like that if he didn't know the financial facts behind it.
Anyway, I own this set because I was somewhat enamored of Mindstorms back in the day. I write "somewhat" because it was one of those things my dad kind of forced on me. He wanted LEGO to be more than just a toy for me, and Mindstorms (he hoped) would be the spark that light the programming fire within me, just like he experienced back in the 80s studying computer science. Sadly for him, I was more interested in designing and building robots rather than getting them to perform more and more complex tasks.
When the Exploration Mars expansion pack was finally released, I pounced on it because the subject material was all the rage at the turn of the century. After the 1997 Pathfinder mission and the brief hope that life had been found on Mars after all, Mars mania was in full tilt for me. I recall making all the main builds from the Constructopedia (the name for instruction manuals in Mindstorms sets) and programming them, but after that, the set kind of became a spare parts bin until late 2002 in my eighth grade science fair. Having procured the Vision Command expansion kit the year before, I had exactly what I needed to make decent Martian rover vehicles. My idea for the fair, therefore, was to build a few different examples of Martian rovers to assess how to best negotiate Martian terrain and obstacles.
I made three different rovers: one tracked, one with big wheels, and another with a crude, stilt-walking mechanism. I named them each after different ancient names for Mars from different cultures. With my dad's help, I built a large test bed to simulate the Martian terrain, which included copious amounts of red sand and various rocks. With the Vision Command camera and RCX programming, I was able to make the rovers semi-autonomous. When the basic programming failed, I would take over the controls and use the camera's view of the terrain to drive the vehicle. To be true to life, I only made commands after a four-minute delay.
It was great fun, using LEGO for a school project, and it paid off! I won not only first place in my school's math and technology category, but Best in Show overall! That took me to the regional science fair a few months later, where I scored third place in the math and technology category. Although this was better than any of my other peers and thus qualified me for the state science fair, I reasoned my chances of placing were slim if I only could garner third place at the regional level.
As for the Mindstorms robots made from Vision Command and Exploration Mars, they slowly were cannibalized for parts until I finally disassembled them entirely after moving to my new house in April 2003. With my BIONICLE and Star Wars fandom in full swing, the science fair adventures of 2003 were the last time I really got serious with LEGO Mindstorms. The sets are all packed away, the software and hardware now horribly obsolete. Still, I can't quite bring myself to just parting out the pieces into my general loose parts collection. Too many good, victorious memories embedded in those bricks, I suppose.
And this is... this is...?
The box says 246 pieces, not 155..
@EvilTwin said:
"The box says 246 pieces, not 155.."
It's because only 155 pieces are in Lego's database, Brickset only counts what Lego has recorded.
It was basically a parts expansion pack for Mindstorms with a variety of build ideas. I remember enjoying it
https://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/9736/Exploration_Mars
There's a picture at https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=9736-1 T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0}
Essentially, a early form of the batmobile 76122, with one motor for each set of wheels to allow forward/backward drive and turning on the spot. Most of the brick count was for a Lego basic lander, but would have being more useful if they had provided technic beams, plates, gears, axles etc. There were also instructions for a robotic arm. It seemed to be a more interesting way of packaging the mindstorms RCX brick for home or primary school use, rather than just selling the unit on its own, at a more affordable price as missing all the mindstorm RCX sensors from the full education version. It does include four Support Insectoid Leg Large (30212) which only appeared in 3 other Arachnoid sets, e.g 6977 from 1998.
So, the only way to look at this set is to download the instructions. Great job on the box art, LEGO
This was a great set for the fact it had two really long (3 meters?) 9-volt cables.
Does anyone know of Mindstorms items from that era still in working order?
@Bornin1980something
I have been itching to try Mindstorms RCX for a few years now; since when I was a teen, I was given a Scholastic book focusing on Mindstorms RCX projects. This was back when NXT had already been out 3-4, even 5 years, so it was dated, even then. As of late, I've noticed the low cost of the components on Bricklink (and this set--$45!), and posted a thread on it over in the forum. In short it's possible, but a little tough.
https://forum.brickset.com/discussion/28734/mindstorms-rcx latest
I've only recently gotten into the RCX era of Mindstorms, and it's rather accessible as long as you have an older PC to program with and willingness to ignore the dry-rot of the cables.
@Bornin1980something said:
"Does anyone know of Mindstorms items from that era still in working order?"
I'd be curious to try.
Actually the Robotics Invention Set (Mindstorms) is by far the most successful Lego set ever, with around one million copies sold. Even though I not wasn't cheap. Definitely brought me out of my dark ages.
@HOBBES:
Lego_Lord_Mayorca has it correct. At one point during one of my three trips to NYTF (2002-2004), I learned that the top four themes, at that time, were (in order from 1st to 4th) Bionicle, Star Wars, Creator, and Harry Potter. Bionicle sold so incredibly well that, while the rest of the company was wearing barrels with suspenders, they actually built a brand-new injection molding production line to keep up with the insane demand for Bionicle parts. They financed that production line by raising the price on the original Toa sets by a measly buck. The alternative would have been to significantly reduce production of non-Bionicle sets that weren't as profitable. Let that sink in a bit. They were losing money on what they were producing at the time, so they invested in an increase in production capacity. Under normal circumstances, that would basically result in spending money to increase your capacity to lose money, but because it enabled them to produce Bionicle sets specifically, it dug them out of the hole. The other thing to keep in mind was that LSW only sold really well in 1999, 2002, and 2005. They posted annual losses in 2003 and 2004, which were the gap years between Ep2 and Ep3, when sales of LSW sets cooled off a bit. This was around the time when they learned that licensed properties sold better when there was a movie in theaters, or a show on TV, that could help drive sales. SW:CW wouldn't debut until 2008, which basically meant that they had gap years in 2000-2001, 2003-2004, and 2006-2007 before they finally had a multi-season TV series to drive the toy line. Around the time Disney killed SW:CW, they were ramping up marketing for SW:Rebels, so there was no transitional gap between the two, and they haven't stopped churning out new material ever since.
I have this set, but I have zero idea why. Looking through the parts list on Bricklink, I really don't see anything noteworthy in it, so best I can come up with is that I must have found it on extreme discount (enough to not be concerned about what was actually in the set), because I can't imagine I bought it just for the 9v wires. And I can't imagine shelling out money for anything else in that set.
@PIRAKA_06:
Heh. So there are three distinct generations of 9v wires that I've been able to identify. When I first started buying 9v wires, I'd had a chance to examine several owned by another member of MichLUG when we did shows (nearly every show we do involves running 9v trains, so they're ever-present). He had wires with thin insulation, and others with thick insulation. The thing that stood out about the thin insulation was that it tended to pull out of the connections, leaving both wires fully exposed right where it entered the connectors, so I always made a point of asking for thick insulation when I bought wires on Bricklink.
Since then, I've figured out that there are two distinct variants of thin insulation. The really thin stuff was so thin that the connectors couldn't grip the insulation, hence why it tended to result in exposed wire right next to the connectors. The thin and medium insulation, however, looked nearly identical, and were very hard to tell apart _unless_ the wire ended up exposed in that manner. The thick insulation, which had a squared-off shape, was very easy to distinguish, which made buying it much easier. And so I hit a point where _all_ of my 9v wires started deteriorating. Fortunately, we've got a guy in our LUG who had already started playing around with wires, at one point making some modded 9v wires that were something like 20' long using basic speaker wire. Since then, he's found a source for black insulated wire that looks nearly identical to authentic LEGO wire, which he can buy by the spool. Various members of our LUG have taken to bringing in their rotted 9v wires whenever he's participating in one of our shows, and by the time we're ready to pack up and go home they have newly refurbished 9v wires ready to go. Since you're already giving up being 100% authentic, there's always the very attractive possibility of asking for custom lengths rather than just replicating the original lengths, or asking for short wires to be matched to authentic wires of greater length.