OK, this has little to do with Java how ever it is just too cool to pass up a comment on.

After months of speculation that Mindstorms had seen better days Lego announced that they were releasing a vastly improved version. From what I can tell its going to rock! The sensors are tons better (rotation sensors that can tell the difference between 2 degress and 14 degrees for one) and there are more interesting ones out of the box. I for one am going to be spending lots of money and time (that I don't have) on this toy.

One of the things I've really missed (and more so my oldest son) is the ability to work with Lego Mindstorms with a kid friendly environemnt. The RoboLab program worked in clasic but was bugy and a pain to get just so. The programming env worked ok but getting a program uploaded to the RCX was always a pain. Well they finally updated to work with OSX. Rock and roll! Andrew (oldest son) is now reading the programming manual (instead of sleeping). Next up is to make him do the same thing in Java that he is doing with the RoboLab stuff.

If you are not familiar with it LeJos is the way to go for doing java, the Eclipse plugin works well too. Its been a while sence they have had a release but it works like a champ.

Lego finally responded to all the info that's been floating around about the end of Mindstorms

If you read the original release (Jan 8th) closely it does not mention specifically that they will be dropping electronic products. The Yahoo story that started it all must have come from conversation instead of the release.

Andrew (my oldest) and I built the NavBot this weekend. It basically is the RoverBot from the 2.0 directions with the tread instead of wheels. Its able to turn on its center so we should be able to play with the nav java programs from the Core Lego Mindstorms book.
I'm not sure yet if we will build the electronic compas. Anyone else built it? If so please post a comment and let me know how it went.