LEGO Announces GNU/LInux-Powered Mindstorms EV3 Platform 164
First time accepted submitter Barryke writes "Today LEGO announces the new mohawk (NASA's turf) sporting MINDSTORMS EV3 platform (press release). And with details on its features and innards (in Dutch) which in short comes down to: 'Its intelligent brick sports an ARM9-soc running Linux on 64MB RAM and 16MB storage memory, and supports SD cards. There are also four ports, which allow four other 'Bricks' can be connected. The intelligent brick can be reached by WiFi, USB and Bluetooth, and supports control via Android and iOS devices. It comes with 3 servo's, two touch sensors and an IR sensor to track other robots at upto six meters. It also includes 17 build plans, shown in 3D using Adobe Inventor Publisher.'"
Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:5, Informative)
GNU and Linux can be separated.
GNU is all the core utilities and libraries typically associated with a Linux system.
Linux is the kernel.
Put them together you get GNU/Linux.
BusyBox is not GNU although can be built using GNU libc, so has some GNU.
Android is not dependent on GNU at all although uses the C library.
Many non-GNU projects use the GPL.
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Whoosh!
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uClibc is hosted on the same page as BusyBox. It's smaller and has less bloat.
Less bloat, ok but at the expense of less compatibility with existing code and more strange behavior or bugs that make existing code taking unexpected action. I use uClibc since 10 years now and I have not a single project where I don't have to fix a bug, add a support, or patch the application code to get the expected result.
Today memory is very cheap and the economy in size of the uClbc is not enough anymore to justify the lost in development time to use it, unless you maybe playing with very large quanti
Re: Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:3)
First, they haven't distributed these yet.
Second, they only have to make source code available to those who they distribute binaries to... Not joe public.
I'm very sure when this gets shipping in the Summer Lego will have a portal up with all the goodies.
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that there's much need for generic userspace. It'd probably be something custom anyway, on such a small system. It's not a general purpose setup.
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i just skimmed the articles, but it also just said "linux based". busybox would still be great... but it could easily be as closed platform as android and friends. ;)
if it would be truly open... i think i have some plans to waste a bit of money and time then
and looks like their online designer still has no linux support, so they don't seem to be very interested in that area :>
http://ldd.lego.com/ [lego.com]
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
SPOILER: link gives no mention of end-users being sued, only companies that failed to adhere to the terms. clarification that companies are not end-users.
Re:Linux, not necessarily GNU/Linux (Score:4, Informative)
You can sue for copyright for something other than infringing. I've seen them sue for failing to distribute source in violation of the license, but that's not infringing.
Infringing: 1. Actively break the terms of (a law, agreement, etc.): "infringe a copyright". [lmgtfy.com]
Autodesk, not Adobe (Score:5, Informative)
Man, I bet Autodesk will be pissed to learn that Adobe released a product with the same name as their Inventor Publisher.
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Inventor Publisher is an Autodesk program. The summary says Adobe. The OP was making a joke. Microsoft has nothing to do with it.
Would have loved this... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would have loved this when I was growing up, considering that programmable robots at that time were limited to industry and research labs at universities.
In any event, the asking price seems a bit too high for what LEGO are offering and with what's now available today; touching on just one facet, after a cursory glance on Mouser/DigiKey, PCB manufacturing companies, and 3D printing shops, the so-called intelligent brick, along with its circuitry innards, could easily be fabricated on a one-off basis for under $75-100 USD. For $350 USD, they should have at least thrown in a decent CMOS camera and more servos.
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Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Informative)
Plastic may be inexpensive. LEGO isn't... for the amount of plastic that you actually get anyways, It's actually pretty pricey.
Of course, some would argue that it's worth it, because LEGO has considerably higher quality building bricks than any of its competitors.
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Try molding those bricks like they do and see how inexpensive that is :)
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Informative)
You've got that right. Lego molds are extremely precise -- the jewelry of the machinists' art, and hand cleaned and polished periodically. And they use only top quality resins -- there is ABS, and then there is ABS -- better resins cost more. That is why Lego is expensive.
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It's a top quality product, sure. But it is still just moulded plastic. They could sell it a LOT cheaper if they wanted.
Could they? Lego is not Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
We know Apple could sell the iPhone cheaper because Apple makes massive profits. Does Lego make massive profits? No, in fact before it re-invented itself, it was like Apple in serious trouble of going the way of Meccano. Which still exists but only as a perversion of its former self.
People often seem to think all there is to a product is its physical production. THAT is easy, although Lego is a bit more accurate in its production then most plastic factories, it can be easily replicated to produce a machine to produce simple bricks. BUT that is NOT Lego. Lego is ALL the models, which in box form have often to be in stores for a year or more before hopefully being sold, constantly having to keep up with trends like hot movies because the OLD business model of outdated non-current models wasn't working. And developing Mindstorms wouldn't have been cheap either.
Lego suffers from the high cost of mass production of an INSANE number of parts that all have to be combined, they can't just let one machine run indefinite pushing out one type of brick, it is lots of different pieces in lots of colors that all have to come together in production runs from which only tiny amounts are sent out and the rest has to be stored.
It is a logistacal nightmare and quite different from how other plastic producers like say plastic bottles work, most plastic bottles arrive at the bottling plant in granular form, one machine makes a test tube and another blows it up JUST before it is filled in an constant single item production run. THAT is cheap. Lego's method is not. In fact, lego's method of selling LOTS and LOTS of different models is EXACTLY what Apple is NOT doing. Even Samsung isn't. If Lego was a phone maker, there would be 2000 current models, ALL of them with instructions how alter them completely, combine them and turn them into complex robots.
That is why Lego is expensive. Look at their profits, there is no excessive fat there. You can make cheap clones of a few boxes of lego easily but the entire product range? No. Proof? NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT! Oh you can buy 1 or 2 lego like models from China but NOT the constantly updated catalog lego catalog. You PAY for that.
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It wasn't working because the Legos were too expensive. Few people care about the models. It's a building toy. You get a shoebox of them and build.
The models and cross-licensing lets them sell fewer legos for more money, but they have to pay royalties, so I don't know what the point is.
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The models and cross-licensing lets them sell fewer legos for more money, but they have to pay royalties, so I don't know what the point is.
The point is that some kids are going to point and say HARRY POTTER MOMMY HARRY POTTER or well, that's over now, but you get the idea.
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There are plenty of Lego clones [wikipedia.org] on the market, Mega Bloks being the easiest one to find in the USA. They are often cheaper than Lego products, both in cost and quality. If all that you care about is cost, go with the them.
The cross-licensing deals are what keeps the products on store shelves (as they do sell very well) at major retailers instead of just hobby shops. If you think that Lego products are expensive now, you really wouldn't like the price if they didn't have the licensed sets.
So everyone, enj
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Unless it's the other way around...
Maybe adults say "Jimmy likes Harry Potter", and then buy him the set?
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I think it's more along the lines of advertising tells the parent that all the other children have Harry Potter themed lego but their own child is sad because they don't and that the only way to be a half decent parent is to work more hours away from their child in order to afford Harry Potter themed lego ...
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Three words for you: Do The Math.
I'm pretty sure you have no idea what it takes to create a mold for injection molding. I have made molds and shot plastic. Crappy molds, because I'm an amateur machinist, but I have shot ABS in molds I made myself using a 20 ton Morgan Press manual injection molding machine, and taught others how to do it. Come back and tell me "it's just plastic" after you have made a mold in hardened tool steel, with tolerances spec'ed in hundreths of millimeters, and a high-polish surface specification, and shot millions of parts while keeping the dimensions and surface finish within spec. You can show me your math then. Until then, stop talking out of your ass.
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Yup. I don't even think that all injection molding companies could produce to LEGO's tolerances and quality requirements. As in: you've got professionals who don't know enough to pull it off, yet they otherwise do OK in their business. I live in an area with overabundance of automotive suppliers, many of them doing plastic injection molding and what they can do is mostly nowhere near what you'd need for LEGO bricks.
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to bring this down to the streets a grandkid can be playing with his Grandfathers lego and his own and not have to worry about stuff not fitting. (I have Lego Bricks older than you so shut it!)
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The moulds, once cast, are machined on the same CNC machines as every other mould in the world. Getting the feeler gauges out, with the vernier tools, and checking tolerances, is no different to any other job. I produced models of parts, that eventually were injection moulded, and I could meet a tolerance of 0.05mm using hand tools alone.
They are polished, by hand, by people with lower skills as myself. It's not hard; itâ€(TM)s semi-skilled.
I've see
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You must be great at your job, then, because there have been a couple of vendors that I worked with that were nowhere as good...
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Informative)
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Agreed. There is a lego clone called megabloks - that uses the same interface as lego but much cheaper. If you mix lego with megabloks, it is clear that the megabloks build quality is far inferior, leading to crap buildings that fall over. lego is actually decent stuff.
Long before Mega Bloks, TYCO was making Lego knock-off blocks. They sucked too.
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to which megabloks are you referring? There's the "first builders" line which is not comparable to legos, but to duplos (another product of the lego company). I have seen nothing to indicate that duplos are superior to megabloks. My children love their legos, but they also love the megabloks. Because the tolerances are looser (which works due to the significantly larger scale) the megabloks are *much* easier to work with than legos. Brand new lego bricks are hard to snap together and snap apart (even an adu
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That's ill-advised, unless you actually *like* paying large hospital bills.
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You are making a common error in consumer understanding of retail economics. Cost of production is only the start in determining price.
Lego is expensive because that's the optimal price for the company to maximize its profits. It's expensive because enough people are prepared to buy it at that price. It wouldn't matter if a lego brick cost 0.01 to produce, if they can get enough people to buy it for 10 then that's the price they'll sell it at.
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Economics 102 - Consumers are willing to pay the expensive price because of high perceived quality, which tends to be due to high quality, which tends to cost more to produce.
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics 103 - From 101 and 102 some would conclude that apparently the entire manufacture / market / consumer cycle is a rational process
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Informative)
Plastic generally isn't, no. Plastic made to LEGO's tolerances? Yes. Their tolerance is as little as 0.002 millimeters!
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0.002 millimeters is what they told us when I visited the LEGO factory last year, of course, its impossible to verify for a layman like me, but the machinist was very adamant about the microscopic precision they use in the production process
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Informative)
Two different tolerances:
- 0.002 millimeters for the molds and tooling
- 0.01 millimeters for the finished bricks
The variance on the product is always larger than that for the tooling, w/ each step of the process slightly magnifying any inaccuracy before it.
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10 micrometers = 0.01 millimeters
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Silicon is cheap, too, but people seem to pay hundreds of dollars for it after someone puts a little metal and dopant on it...
Re:Would have loved this... (Score:5, Insightful)
And all of the software that comes with it would take you a significant amount of money on a "one-off basis." Also, you're getting servos, sensors, instructions, and other parts. For $350, that's pretty fucking good.
Why do people always say, "I could build it myself far cheaper?" This is fucking obvious - you can build it with cheaper parts all on your own, assuming the value of your time is (or approaches) zero for the effort of building and coding everything to work properly. together. It's PHB syndrome - I haven't really considered what I'm getting in the box, I'm just shouting about how expensive it is, because it's not as cheap as the 100-brick lego sets I used to have as a kid.
If you can do it cheaper, then you should open a business and compete with Lego - these are popular kits, and they make good money off them. If, however, you can't... then maybe you should stop crying about the price.
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$350 is actually a pretty good price, IMHO.
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Agreed. It's less that the video card I'm about to buy and I can pretend that the lego is 'educational' if my wife inquires.
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``There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.''
-- John Ruskin, English Writer and Critic of art, architecture, and society, 1819-1900
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But "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a _the_same_quality_ and sell a little cheaper" causing only a slight depreciation in wealth for some very rich people who don't need all they have already.
Two questions (Score:2)
1. Do current Mindstorm devices (servos, sensors) work with it? Or am I going to have to buy all new ones?
2. On-brick programming is cute for toys and whatnot, but I had to build an entire communicative framework to do live remote programming control with my PC being the brains, sending and receiving signals over Bluetooth, basically running a processing stub on the brick, but the AI was live running on the PC.
I need to do that for real AI work, kthxbie.
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1. Do current Mindstorm devices (servos, sensors) work with it? Or am I going to have to buy all new ones?
That's what I want to know. I had the original Mindstorm, and when the v2 came out, it was incompatible to the first one. The other issue is will they start keeping their software up to date? The software for even v2 only runs on XP. This is way to expensive of a toy to have it go obsolete because of an OS upgrade.
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There may be some confusion here - version 2 of RCX is XP only. NXT and NXT 2.0 came out later. I think (could be wrong of course) that op is talking about v1 and v2 of RCX - which are xp only and it took some hacks to get the usb ir tower to work on xp. If you have a 64 bit machine with 7 it's a no go. Found that out last year when I dug up my v2 RCX kit to mess around. I didn't have time to dig further - I'm guessing to get it to work I'd need to build out a VM maybe that would let me run the old software
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do they sell the software ? i wouldn't expect them to, i guess the business is in selling the kits, instructions, brand etc :)
if so, opensourcing that software should bring in lots of interest from more advanced crowd and make mindstorms approach the longevity of standard lego set. sure, usually longevity is fought against, but lego owes part of it's existence people having real old sets, seeing how they still fit in with new ones and getting more for their kids (well, or themselves =) )
Re:Two questions (Score:5, Informative)
There's a longer article on CNET [cnet.com] about this that says that the new system will be backwards compatible with existing NXT robots.
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LOL, back not too many years ago when I was in college those were workstation class specs. In fact I knew a group that did realtime American Sign Language interpretation in only twice as much ram and about 50% more storage on an Indigo2 workstation. If you can't make a robot without realtime video processing work in those specs you're doing something wrong.
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If you can't make a robot without realtime video processing work in those specs you're doing something wrong.
I am a computer vision scientist and my day job involves writing computer vision algorithms, often realtime ones. Back when I started I was working on an SGI O2, which at the time was a decent machine because while it was slower than a PC in raw FLOPS, it had zero copy video I/O and more memory bandwidth than Jesus.
I love your dismissiveness of "you're doing something wrong".
It's possible to get a re
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Reread what I said:
If you can't make a robot without realtime video processing
I was commenting on the fact that these robots are working without vision systems, since it's possible to do some form of realtime video processing in the given specs it should be trivial to make a system that's only working on a handful of non-video inputs work in the resources provided.
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Reread what I said:
D'oh!
Rant first, read later!
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Since most of the NXT sensors are just packaged up I2C sensors they should be electrically compatible even if they change the wires. For that matter, they'd be electrically compatible with a $35 Raspberry Pi's I2C bus if they could handle 3.3V or had a 3V3-5V circuit between them.
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most of the NXT sensors are just packaged up I2C sensors
Actually that is not really true at least for the lego sensors (third party sensors are another matter).
The touch sensor is a simple switch
I think the temperature sensor (not included in any kits but available for purchase seperately) is a simple thermister but i'm not positive on that.
The light and sound sensors are analog sensors with some internal electronics.
The ultrasound sensor is I2C.
I think the color sensor included in the newer NXT kits is also an analog sensor with some electronics but i'm not pos
Ubuntu was made to talk to NXT (Score:2)
Geek-gasm (Score:2)
...coming in 3...2...1...
Still a NXT brick at its core, it seems. (Score:2)
Although that's a good thing for people who already have stuff, because it means its compatible with NXT sensors and motors, at the same time I'm a bit disappointed because the NXT only has 7 I/O ports, and to control more devices you need another NXT brick.
What would be nice is if you control more than just the 7 devices that you can plug into the brick without having to add another programmable brick to the system... say, by separating things like device power supply from device control, and using a s
Re:Still a NXT brick at its core, it seems. (Score:5, Informative)
What would be nice is if you control more than just the 7 devices that you can plug into the brick without having to add another programmable brick to the system... say, by separating things like device power supply from device control, and using a separate battery box (or boxes) to supply power to as many devices as you want, and the cpu simply addresses them in a not entirely dissimilar way to how many USB devices are addressed on a single bus.
The functionality you want is already available on existing NXT bricks.
The sensor ports on NXT bricks use I2C for communication, allowing "sensors" to be daisy chained and referred to by address. Since the communication across the bus can be bi-directional (though half duplex), you can easily add I2C controlled motor controllers with external power supplies. There is also the RS485 port, for higher speed bi-directional communication.
Want more sensors? Simply daisy chain them on an I2C port. (I usually custom make cables for specific purposes, but there are also multiplexers available which could potentially allow for over 128 i2c addressed devices on a single port). An example of a commercially available daisy chain splitter - http://www.mindsensors.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=79 [mindsensors.com]. Multiplexer? http://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NSX2020 [hitechnic.com].
Want to control more motors? Simply add a I2C controlled motor controller - a simple circuit to make yourself, or buy one of the commercially available options. In most cases you would use these with an external power supply (i.e. battery box).
Separating "things like device power supply from device control" is as simple as making your own cables... or use some of the commercially available motor controllers. For example this motor controller (a simple i2c based DC motor controller, with lego RCX plugs in the PCB) requires an external 9v power supply - http://www.mindsensors.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=58 [mindsensors.com].
Using USB for these purposes rather than I2C would be far more complex. I2C is very simple to use, and is fast enough for most motor and sensor IO.
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Cool, but an exposed pcb is not as convenient as something built to LEGO specs, both in terms of dimensions and connectivity.
I know I might just sound like I only want to bitch and complain about st
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The sensor ports on NXT bricks use I2C for communication, allowing "sensors" to be daisy chained and referred to by address.
Third party sensors generally yes, lego sensors no. Most of the lego sensors don't use I2C and the only one i'm aware of that does (the ultrasound sensor) is not readdressable.
That is why you need a device like the hitechnic sensor mux (which you admittedly did link) that can deal with all the different types of lego sensor and then present the results as an I2C device. Not cheap though.
Want to control more motors? Simply add a I2C controlled motor controller - a simple circuit to make yourself, or buy one of the commercially available options. In most cases you would use these with an external power supply (i.e. battery box).
Indeed you have to use an external battery box.
Separating "things like device power supply from device control" is as simple as making your own cables...
Not really, the NXT has no external power connection* so you can't really r
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That is why you need a device like the hitechnic sensor mux (which you admittedly did link) that can deal with all the different types of lego sensor and then present the results as an I2C device. Not cheap though.
You can however very easily use a pcf8591 to create your own i2c interface for analog sensors... Simple circuit, good for learning & experimenting, and the necessary parts are easily and very cheaply available.
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For there intended audience, the I2C bus is still a very good choice, since there only have to deal with a very limited quantity of low speed sensors and actuators.
But I agree with you, there is probably a business opportunity to setup a standard based on USB for less toys oriented robotic. Something that make straightforward to add a new feature in a robot:
- Can be compatible across many manufactures (including your own hacking).
- Driver code contributed into a common open source project.
- Auto detection o
Wait... what? (Score:2)
64MB RAM and 16MB storage ???
That can't be right...
Seriously... it makes no sense. When is storage capacity *smaller* than ram?
The article either has it backwards, or else they meant 16gb of storage.
Re:Wait... what? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would actually make quite a lot of sense for a custom system where the control software (essentially the OS) is provided in the srtorage component (16MB), and things like actual programs are loaded into RAM. Since typically (as far as I recall) mindstorm programs are loaded into the brick at runtime, it makes perfect sense that no storage is used for this, other than perhaps a ramdisk.
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Since typically (as far as I recall) mindstorm programs are loaded into the brick at runtime
You are kind of out of date. The RCX kept almost everything in ram (which was a PITA, take the batteries out and you had to redownload the firmware before you could program it again) but the NXT uses flash for user programs and updatable firmware.
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With support for sd cards, who needs storage other than for the OS itself?
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Look at every SOHO router released in the last 10 years, small flash for OS+base programs and some ram to run code. Boot from a bzip2 image to ram drive and execute from there.
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why?
try programming anything?
(besides it's moot since your code would be sitting on the sd card.. but it's not unfeasible to think of plenty of things where you'd se 64mbytes and more of memory but which would take much less than 16mbytes of space in executable form).
Sweet. (Score:2)
Does this mean that I can finally retire my venerable WRT54G?
More info on the EV3 (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.quora.com/lego_tidbits/Lego-Mindstorms-EV3-More-Info
next time on legoland (Score:2)
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"servos", NOT "servo's" (Score:3, Informative)
For goodness sake, I wish whoever wrote that would learn written English. Also, it's "videos", "photos", and so on.
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For goodness sake
Shouldn't that be "For goodness's sake"? ;)
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We’d probably use for goodness’s sake
Now, should it be "neener neener" or "neener-neener"?
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battery life (Score:3)
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It would be better if the brick would simply accept these new 3.7v Lithium batteries in the AA format. It's better to be able to swap batteries, to be able to buy the batteries at your supermarket, etc.
New advertising technique? (Score:2)
1. post critical article [slashdot.org] about $product (make sure the article also contains rebuttals);
2. followup 2 weeks later with new $product announcement that proves previous criticism wrong;
3. profit!
Not necessarily carried out consciously by news aggregation sites such as this one, but possibly still orchestrated by $product's marketing dept.
New paranoia technique? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's hard to link a product announcement from Lego with an unrelated article from NY Times two weeks earlier. The idea that Lego stores up product announcements and then releases them two weeks after some guy somewhere writes an article about them is pretty much ridiculous.
Just a matter of time until Lego SkyNet (Score:2)
Re:Brick your Brick? (Score:5, Funny)
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in soviet russia, brick phone YOU!
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Re:awesome (Score:4, Informative)
Lego are the best adult toys.
Just wait until you discover marital aids.
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Lego are the best adult toys.
Just wait until you discover marital aids.
Just don't combine the two :S
Re: awesome (Score:2)
Rule 34!
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Been there, done that: Legos are cheaper, and they haven't thrown my girlfriend out the window because I spent too much time with her rather than them.
I could go on forever with this: they don't invite their mother over to take their side in disagreements; they don't not want to play for one week out of the month...
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If you are talking about Scratch playing with Lego NXT, take a look at this: http://enchanting.robotclub.ab.ca/tiki-index.php [robotclub.ab.ca]
If you are talking about Scratch on the pi, that should work out of the box.
Finally, if you want to use the Lego motors and sensors with the pi, I am not aware of any existing project, but I know that they have been used with an arduino, so it should be possible to drive them from the pi. It would be more powerful and probably cheaper than the new NXT brick, although I suspect that m