Hobby Robot
I don't know how you guys feel?
When I first see the lego mindstorm humanoid robot, I'm nearly crazy about it. See http://mindstorms.lego.com/. Programmable interface, visual sensors, sound sensors, bluetooth ... etc. That means I can program a pet, who is able to say "Hi, lady, you are so hot! ", when it see a beautiful girl :)! And most important it is not that expensive as I thought, 239,75 EUR from a ebay seller.
With mindstorms I can better make use of my computer vision knowledge to make more fun. Not just differentiate a laser and inkjet printout or photocopies. Not suprisely you will find lots of communities, rototics research group etc. which use mindstorm as prototype for education, research and HOBBY!
Lego has joined the Microsoft Robotics Studio Program, which means your programs may not be robot dependent. You can also program lego robot with Java, see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/.
If you have more interests to this kind of stuff, there are a list of programmable robots at active robots.
I stopped being interested in this when I saw it came with something like 64KB (I don't remember the exact number, just that it was hideously low) of memory. I too, wanted to do something with computer vision and also make my own color printer (with colored pencils :)). I was eagerly awaiting this product from Lego, as I am a huge fan ever since I was a kid. But when I saw the specs I was utterly disappointed. Am I missing something?
:(, I did not notice that, thanks. In 2007 a 64 KB memory? What do they think? I want to know right now how fast is the cpu. If it is fast enough, I hope the memory is extensible, otherwise the other robots are more attractive.
In wikipedia I found that the typical frequence is 48 MHz.