Imagine my satisfaction when reading the recent issue of Motion Systems Design and find yet another industrial reference to the LEGO Group, Billund, Denmark. Being that my first real engineering projects were built using LEGOS as a boy, it is very pleasing to me that it's kept pace with the baby boomer generation and has followed us to work.

Mindstorms NXT by the LEGO Group provides a toolkit interface for LabView users, allowing them to use drag and drop graphical programing by National Instruments Corp (NASDAQ:NATI) out of Austin, Texas, to create virtual instrumentation for utilization in operating and controlling the Mindstorms NXT robotics platform. While the toolkit is intended to facilitate advanced user's interaction with NXT robotics, the maker states that its design may be successfully utilized by children as young as ten years old.

National Instruments states in a press release issued in December: "Once users download a LabVIEW program to the NXT, they can use the toolkit to interact with the NXT robot while a program is running." The toolkit is designed and intended for use with LabVIEW versions 7.1, 8.0 and 8.20.

National Instruments is a designer and manufacturer of hardware and programming environments for utilization in the testing, observation and control of a wide variety of physical attributes such as pressure, heat and electrical current flow. Additionally, N.I. provides test management software applications for use in industrial systems analysis. National Instruments may be considered for the custom design of testing regimens to best capture and exploit any manner of in house, statistical process control (SPC) testing and functionality programs.

National Instruments stock closed at $26.67 on 02-16-07 at about double its average volume. NATI's 52-week high of $34.14 was set on 04-21-06, and its 52-week low of $24.41 was set on 07-18-06. National Instruments recorded EPS of $1.06 for fiscal 2006 and pays a quarterly dividend of 7 cents.