Random set of the day: Ultimate Builders Set
Posted by Huwbot,Today's random set is 3800 Ultimate Builders Set, released during 2001. It's one of 3 Mindstorms sets produced that year. It contains 321 pieces, and its retail price was US$60/£49.99.
It's owned by 401 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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19 comments on this article
Well, it doesn't appear to have instructions, so I guess we're just freewheeling it with Mindstorms in this one.
Glad I can finally check off “Find the ultimate builders set” from my list.
I don’t get what’s so ultimate about a lump of technic with eyes and a mindstorms brick on it.
So is this 1.5 generation a sort of midpoint between RCX and NXT? Is there any significant difference? I grew up with the EV3 so I’m not familiar with older MindStorms sets.
I _may_ own this. I picked up a couple of the Mindstorms accessory sets on clearance in those days, just for parts.
@Spidermanager:
No, that’s not it at all. The original RCX brick (1.0) had a power Jack so you could run it off an outlet. The problem was, it was an AC jack (rare), not a DC jack (common), and people didn’t realize this. Official power adapters (output 9v AC) were expensive, and people quickly realized they could buy an aftermarket adapter for cheap, but usually ended up buying the DC style (Radio Shack sold both AC and DC universal adapters with a voltage output selector and interchangeable/reversible tips). If you ran low power, that actually worked. If you maxed out the output of the RCX, it involved running the full load on one side of the power bus that was designed to carry the same load split evenly between both sides. This fried a lot of power busses. The good news is they still worked off batteries, and you could even still run _low_ power through the other side of the bus (go too high and you got a repeat failure that killed the power jack completely).
So, 1.5 is the transition. The 1.0 RCX had the power jack removed, some tweaks were made to the main RIS kit in terms of set inventory, and a 1.5 add-on pack was released so you could upgrade an RIS 1.0 to the same set inventory. A full overhaul of the set inventory came later with RIS 2.0, and the NXT brick was introduced in Mindstorms NXT.
The NXT brick brought back the power jack by way of a rechargeable Li-Poly battery pack. You could run the NXT brick off the battery, while charging the battery off an outlet (if you run constantly at max load, you can actually deplete a fully charged battery this way). This way, if you royally screwed up somewhere, you just killed the battery instead of the fancy computer brick. I don’t believe EV3 got a rechargeable battery, and I have no idea what the current state of Mindstorms is, with the push to switch everything to smartphone controls, the fact that such controls work with only a handful of phones, and the near certainty that there will be zero legacy support down the road.
You can tell it's ultimate from the lightning strikes in the background
@NatureBricks said:
"Is Mindstorms still a thing?"
Now that you mention it, I’m really not sure. They haven’t advertised any of them for a while.
51515 is still on the shop.
They just don't make accessory/parts packs like this anymore.
@MCLegoboy said:
"Well, it doesn't appear to have instructions, so I guess we're just freewheeling it with Mindstorms in this one."
The instructions come in a CD.
That's right. Mario wasn't the first to include exclusively digital instructions.
It's an odd Clikits set, though, isn't it?
@RaiderOfTheLostBrick said:
" @NatureBricks said:
"Is Mindstorms still a thing?"
Now that you mention it, I’m really not sure. They haven’t advertised any of them for a while."
Maybe this set finally uses 'ultimate' correctly and this was the last one :D
I think I found this once in a charity shop. I put a message out if anyone wanted me to get it.
No one did.
@LegoSonicBoy said:
"They just don't make accessory/parts packs like this anymore.
@MCLegoboy said:
"Well, it doesn't appear to have instructions, so I guess we're just freewheeling it with Mindstorms in this one."
The instructions come in a CD.
That's right. Mario wasn't the first to include exclusively digital instructions."
I knew about the infamous CyberMaster set and its digital instructions to the point that it's hard to find anything online about what it actually includes...
It makes sense that Mindstorms did the same then.
I used to own the 2006 NXT set and that did it as well, the digital instructions.
Never heard about the stuff PurpleDave mentioned before. It sounds like quite the design oversight, especially because to me it felt like common sense to do it like with the NXT and I just assumed the RIS series did that already. The more you know...
I’m like, Ultimate Builder Gonzo!That was out of left field!
-zooms in- Oh, never mind.
@Binnekamp:
Apparently there were two, but the original NXT packs (9798) ran $55, and the second version (9693) was $80. I’m not sure why they made two versions. EV3 finally got one (45501) that runs a whopping $100. The RCX never had one. I suspect that it was a timing issue. They had a solution that should have helped reduce the amount of alkalines being pumped into landfills (plus you could always run it on NiMHs), but for some reason opted for AC input, which I didn’t even know was a thing until I heard about why people were burning out their power busses. From there it was a period of triage, as they figured out how to react to all these RCX bricks being damaged. The 9798 battery launched with 8527, so they clearly had that figured out during the NXT design process. My guess is that by the time they figured out that a rechargeable battery could be a workaround to the power bus problem, it was too late to be worth introducing for the RCX. I think I’ve heard of some people rigging up their own solutions, basically making a dummy pack with a DC power jack, which lets you feed wall power directly into the battery contacts.
And if TLG didn’t have a fascination with 9v AC power, the NXT and EV3 probably would have had direct power jacks like the original RCX.
@Mandalorian6285:
It has a motor, a long 9v wire, a pneumatic cylinder/hose/switch, and a CD with additional material. And yeah, these expansion packs probably weren’t hot sellers, which is how I picked up a few for half price.
Weirdly though this contained an exclusive Slizer Disc but neither a matching shooter nor any connection to the theme whatsoever^^
@PurpleDave Thanks for the insight!
I guess Boost has replaced MindStorms in some fashion, but LEGO did make a newer teal-and-white inventor kit along with miniature brick-built versions.
I own this, and thoroughly enjoyed it when I first got it. I was obsessed with building Mindstorms robots at the time (I guess I was 11 or 12). The one on the cover could climb up a ladder type structure with its arms, whilst shifting its weight (using the RCX brick as the counterweight).
It also had instructions to build a tabletop sweeper which would drive around a table without falling off, and a disc shooter which used one of the Slizer/Throwbot discs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTpppsXoxuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGzcUBs4NnQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcsew57P9qg