Linux-Powered Lego-Like Devices Target Developers

An anonymous reader writes "A six-person startup is readying a product resembling nothing so much as a set of electronic Legos for device designers. The idea is to provide a set of snap-together components from which engineers can build 'anything,' the company claims, without having to learn solid state electronics. Both hardware and software (Linux/Java phoneME/OSGi) are open source, so that over time, the Lego box will grow, the company hopes. Initially, there's an ARM11-powered base with built-in wifi, and modules for camera, GPS, motion detector, LCD display, keyboard, touchscreen, and stereo speakers. Ooh, and a mysterious 'teleporter,' too."

Without Learning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now so-called engineers can build things without knowing how they work, doesn't sound like an engineer to me, more like a simple programmer, more specifically, a java programmer. Nothing more than a glorified typist.

Don't worry about the 'complex' stuff, let java do it FOR you.

No need to learn electronics, let other people do it for you. Just snap together the components.

I look dread the new crop of programmers and 'engineers' being 'output' by the educational system.

Re:Right....

[Brian Gordon]

Hm.. a GPS module.. Who wants to bet that someone makes a product called a "bug tracker" :)

Re:So..

[Kamots]

Mmm... adult?

We used the lego-mindstorms in my grad-level robotics class. We were using a C compiler for them (think it, and the OS we were loading were open source even), and as long as you remembered that you didn't have any floating point... (i.e., 5/2*2 would be 4 not 5...) and that you had very limited stack space with no protection (use more than 1k stack and you were overwriting your heap...) you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. For example we were doing onboard inverse kinematics and pathfinding algorithms. Then you add in the ability to talk to them... and you start being able to get them to perform cooperative tasks.

What I found most interesting about them was due to thier "legotastic" nature, it become very apparent how much influence the physical design has on your software design... and how difficult software problems could be changed with minor hardware tweaks and vice-versa. Having the ability to modify the physical design of the robot taught a *lot* more than merely being able to work with software did (as some work we later did with some Aibo's showed).

Connector problems

[Animats]

Brick-like things with multi pin connectors are usually a headache. Either one side of the connector has to float, or you need a very rigid mounting system. Military systems tend to be built with boxes that you shove into a slot, and even with military grade components, heavy latching systems, and high insertion forces, those connectors are a trouble spot. That's why you don't often see things like that in consumer products.

Cute idea, though, if they get all the mechanical details right.

Re:Gumstick

[megaditto]

Gumstix aren't exactly cheap (seems to be in the $100+ range for anything useful).

It's a little sad that people have to pay that much when all they really need is a $5 PIC and a few throwaway components.

Re:Without Learning?

[glindsey]

You do *not* have to be intimately familiar with the low-level details of all the hardware in order to combine it together in a useful way."

OK, I agree, but simply mashing together some technologies does not an engineer make.

Perhaps not, but it's a damned good start. I was just thinking about the world my seven-month-old daughter will be growing up in. Computers are ubiquitous, nearly throwaway, and run extremely complex operating systems that abstract out the hardware as much as possible. Electronics of any complexity require you to use surface-mount components on two or four-layer PCBs, well beyond the breadboard-and-solder level. There's no real analogue to the DOS command line and GW-BASIC I grew up learning to program on. Assuming she grows up being a computer geek like her father (a huge assumption, but still something to consider), what's out there to honestly get her interested in electronics or computing?

I came up with a concept about a year back that was similar to this, although cheaper and cruder in concept: modules a bit more complicated than Mindstorms, all cubes in shape, communicating and getting power along a sort of wire mesh using a serial protocol favoring fault tolerance over speed. A CPU module could query everything on the bus to see what is connected, get responses back, and interface with a PC, which would present a list of the modules and the functions each of them can provide. (You know, like object-oriented programming, but with physical objects.)

Unfortunately, I don't have the time, money, or mechanical/electrical skills for such an endeavor, but that's the sort of electronics and programming lab I would have killed for as a kid. You get the cost of each module down to around one to five bucks (depending on the module's capabilities) and you have a totally expandable, programmable building system.

Re:Right....

[Gospodin]

Sell it as environmentalism. "We take discarded bugs from software around the world, run them through our industrial-grade recycling plant, and turn it into pure, post-consumer recycled BUGS(r)."

Re:Without Learning?

[Indiana Joe]

There's no real analogue to the DOS command line and GW-BASIC I grew up learning to program on.

Maybe on your computer there isn't... but I can double-click Terminal and drop straight into bash. From there I can launch vi/emacs, code in C, Java, perl, python, or ruby, and then compile and launch the program, all from the command line. I admit there isn't a Basic interpreter - should there be one?