Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the but-will-it-run-under-wine dept.
BHS_Turf writes "Check out Lego's version of
CAD , and give your kid everything you never had (like unlimited Lego)... or you may find that it's something cool for you to do in your spare time! "
Q: But LEGO CAD isn't even optimized for 32-bit Windows 95 operation. Why not? A: As a LEGO Dacta product, LEGO CAD was developed primarily for the educational market. As developers, we were faced with producing a program which would run on everything from MAC 68040 machines to Windows 95 and beyond, in a limited amount of time, on a fixed budget.
I really appreciate a company that would explain why the program is slow and un-optimized in the FAQ. Hopefully this program will sell pretty well so they can devote the resources to updating it. It definately looks worth the effort.
There's a community freeware version of this for Windows AND Linux called LeoCAD. It looks pretty cool (although, I admit I haven't tried it). While the Autodesk/Lego one has 63 available pieces, LeoCAD has over 1000! I didn't see anything on the lego dacta page about purchasing (other than where to find distributors), anyone know how much it costs?
On an offtopic side note, it's funny that they put this story up, but didn't think LeoCAD deserved mention when I submitted it a few months ago. I think there are just too many/. editors with different interests.
which is why you show them leocad instead. Runs on windows and linux
Re:Shipped on two 3 1/2" disks
by
Gen-GNU
·
· Score: 2
True, but did you look at the distributor list? In the USA, there are a whopping 8 people you can get those 3 disks from. I really don't understand that decision. I know it's supposed to be for kids, as an educational tool and all that, but with a little repackaging, they could have it on the shelves at every best-buy(tm), Wal-Mart(tm), etc. Every person who walked by who remembered playing with legos as a kid would be tempted...and more than a few would buy.
I've always been dubious about all this virtual stuff the entertainment industry keeps trying to foist on my kids. Seems like kind of a rip-off; we get a bunch of expensive synthetic images, they get all the waterfront real estate. However...
You can't step on a Lego car on the stairs, have your leading foot fly out from under you as the toy car caroms off the wall, fall on your ass, bounce all the way to the bottom, and permanently fuck up your lower back, either. Whereas you CAN do all that with a real toy car, as I did.
This really reminds me of Douglas Coupland's book, "Microserfs", when a bunch of geeks defect from MS to write "Oop!", an object-oriented lego style program.....if this CAD program is anywhere near as cool as that, I'm _very_ interested.
"I always wondered about kids who build lego toys out of any color legos, mixing and matching colors, with no order or patterns. I'd hate to see the code that they program nowadays."
I guess I was the only one who was too poor to afford Legos... I often wonder how I would have turned out if I had had the chance to bend my brain around those ugly little blocks while I was a kid.
Now I'm grown and have the money(those Legos are still dang expensive, though), but between the clothes strewn across the floor and the computer parts and ramen wrappers strewn across the tables, I don't have room for them.
LegoCAD seems like the perfect chance to live the childhood I never had, but since it lacks the tactile portion, I don't think it will be same. Oh, well. Maybe in another 20 years.
For years, I wanted to create this, and now, they've put it out.
Now if there's ever anything that should be Open Sourced, it's this.
I don't mean the software, necessarily, though that'd be best too.
I mean the blocks - people should be able to design and build custom blocks.
Add behavior/dynamics
Then add a repository, cvs or like SourceForge for these "Open Lego License" blocks that people can have access to, etc.
It's be awesome.
Interesting for adults, but...
by
fluxrad
·
· Score: 2
I'm not so sure that this is going to be good for our children. The whole point of legos is to teach our kids about spacial orientation and design. They can have fun while learning basic skills that they will need to physically function as, not just adults, but humans.
Besides - this seems to take the fun out of it all for kids...now they just be like their parents and sit on their asses all day instead in front of a computer. Oh well, i hope this is just a suppliment rather than a replacement for good old fashioned blocks. What's next? Play-do CAD???
-FluX ------------------------- Your Ad Here! -------------------------
-- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Virtual Lego Markup Language
by
roman_mir
·
· Score: 2
VLML
Should be able to use XML and a DTD to define your own Lego pieces:
Lego must be one of the best toys avalible today.
by
AnarchoFreak_00
·
· Score: 2
Awww... Now that i'm too old for Lego, they bring out robotic Lego, and now LegoCAD. Oh well, at least now I have a reason to have kids.
Seriously though, I think this is a great idea, and does have a point. In class, the kids would be givin a problem, certain restrictions. Then they would have to plan it out first on LegoCAD, before they are allowed to build it. This would teach the kid an enormous amount of skills, escpecialy in the field of engineering. It would be just like real engineering project.
I have to say, out of all the toys on the market today, Lego is about the only thing that will keep ur kid ammused, and acctually do some good at the same time. I.e. they use maths and have to mentaly build the model in there head before they build something just to name a couple of skills.
What does G.I.Joe, action man etc. teach ur kids? Guns are cool? Pokemon; buying things makes u happy?
I am 21 (male) and my sister is 18 (female, duh!), anyways one of her freinds gave here like 3 10 gallon buckets full of legos. Now me, and my geek instances (and childish though pattern) though "WOW!" fucking lego's man, and 30 fucking gallons of them.
I sit down and start going though them, and there are all these fucked up parts I have never seen when I was a kid. There was thousands of lego's, as a kid I loved these fucking things.
So what do I do? I dump them all out and start building a full size coffee table. WTF man, there was like 30 gallons of freaking legos, start with something easy, but since there is so many legos I could build something big!
Remember, this is a 21 year old kid^H^H^H adult smiling and really happy. (lego's are fun).
Anyways I hold a steady job as a system admin, have my own apartment, paying on a car, what some might say as a "productive member of society". The point being, I have/atleast/ some education and/atleast/ some thought patterns moving though my head, it is not like I have the though power of a 2 year old kid, but the thoughts of an adult (on most issuses, besides legos). The point is, I can act professinal and like an adult, but sometimes enjoy playing with lego's when avaiable.
There is nothing wrong with this! Stop judging my LEGO HABIT DAMMIT! It is not like I do it everyday, just once in awhile, and there was 30 fucking gallons of them, have you ever seen 30 fucking gallons of legos, man? Fuck, I bet %99 of slashdot would be atleast intersted in what 30 fucking gallons of lego's look like. Don't fucking judge me on my lego habit dammit, any of you would have done the same thing.
Anyways one of my sisters college freinds (who is extremely hot) (19, female) came in. This chic thinks I am a geek, well because I sit at a computer for 16 hours a day. A loser, because I don't have a girlfreind. A a weirdo, because my social skills are less then par. A pig for referering to the Female gender as "chics" and "women". (She got offened over the word "women"!!!, wtf is the deal with that) And now she see's me on a "lego high" getting my kicks from toys that kids play with.
Admittly it was fun, but it was kinda of embrassering. I seen links in this forum to lego cad programs for Linux, this is good on so many levels.
I can have something that looks like a highly advanced engining computer sceince program on my computer screen, but when in fact I am doing nothing more than playing with lego's.
The moral of the story is:
Chicks don't dig geeks that play with lego's, no matter how many lego's are avaiable.
Chicks don't see the art and science it takes to make a 15 foot battle ship with moving parts from lego's.
Chicks dig complex look GUI 3D programs.
So my question to the slashDOT crowd is; how the hell do you get a girlfreind with OUT compromising your "geek instances"?
&Rant(); sub Rant() { Is it REALLY that fucking wrong to play with lego's? Is it that potically incorrect? Mark me with the fucking plague, I enjoy lego's under certain sisuations! Tie me up, nail me down, hang me, then sit me on a fucking cross and mock me, for the simple fact I enjoy plastic interlocking blocks! I should be fucking shot in the head for the simple enjoyment of colored plastic interlocking cubes. FUCK! kill me, I am ready to go. return; }
--
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Legos in real life are great. Snapping two lego bricks together is very natural and they're not that hard to pick up. Positioning them with a mouse is another story.
If you've tried Gryphon Bricks, ZOI Blocks, Lego Creator or even leocad you can easily tell how clumsy it is to put lego pieces together with the mouse. It's not like a 2D paint program where you just point and click. Instead you point, click, move the arrow keys, click on something else, drag the mouse for a while and then maybe it's in the right spot.
It's a pretty difficult problem, of course, since there's an inherent ambiguity when a 2D mouse coordinate is projected into a 3D world. I worry that this CAD program would be so clumsy it will turn kids off of CAD because they'd rather just use the legos. A cooler product in my mind is Cybones, which uses pieces that aren't so tedious to build with on a computer. And it's more colorful, too.
You must applaud the authors for getting the minimum system specs right, though; most elementary schools don't have the kind of boxes slashdot readers do.
But you can't roll a virtual LEGO car down the stairs. Still, if youdve told me that kids would be using a CAD program to play with LEGOs a decade ago, I would have called you nuts. Still sounds plenty nuts (kids need something tangeable to play with), but it looks kinda fun for adults. Itd make planning a fully LEGO PC case a lot easier. Sharkey www.badassmofo.com
So true, the whole point of Legos is to build them up and break them apart. I especially liked positioning them around a room and putting pillows and blankets on the floor and building a cool little world....anyway...When you build something with legos, you have to make sure it's sturdy and will hold up to attacks from the evil aliens accross the couch with huge death rays build out of those neat little clear, colored cyclinders. When you build it in CAD, it won't tell you when a wall is about to fall over because you used a thin piece instead of a fat piece, or when one of those pulley wheels is going to some off because it wasn't anchored enough. These are things you have to physically do.
Hey, anyone ever read the book Microserfs by Douglas Coupland? Wasn't the software that they were coding, a virtual lego building program, where people could build anything out of lego on their computer?? With infinite numbers of any lego piece? I think they called it OOP..
This sounds a lot like that! Yay Microserfs! Woo! This was the very first geekish book I ever read This was back in the days when Microsoft was socialy exceptible k.
Oh, NOW you've done it. Have you NO idea what this is going to cause? You've just tempted some geek to use this program to design a jet propulsion engine using only legos...
There's your answer. If it's an educational software, geared towards schools, it goes through 'distributors' and buyers and such... I bet it sells for HUGE bucks too...
I worked in a middle school for a couple of years as a LAN tech (yeah, 50+ workstations, 2 labs, Novell 3.xx - lucky brats.:) We played Doom and Descent after school, for hours.). The software that the school system was buying was horrible. Buggy, badly written, amateurish and terribly expensive. It's like buying Aspirin at a Hospital.
Now, if Lego was to retarget this software for public consumption, they'd sell MILLIONS at $39.95 at Fry's, E.B. and CompUSA.
--
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Just a warning, Lego Datca used to be for educators only and is still sold primarily through educational resellers (unlike Lego Technics). These resellers vary in their willingness to sell to non-educators. Quite annoying.
Why does the site seem to make it sound like this can only be used with a couple of Dacta sets (specifically 9630/9645)? No where does it mention using it for other sets, though it seems to imply you could "design" your own parts, hence building a Lego component library...
But why should you? Why not just use LDraw or LeoCAD for modeling your Lego creations?
Another popular win32 lego CAD is MLCad, which is compatible with LDRAW. http://www.user.xpoint.at/m.lachmann/MLCad/MLCAD .htm
-- Peace, education, prosperity, and a clean environment: find out how the free market does it right.
Shipped on two 3 1/2" disks
by
Refried+Beans
·
· Score: 3
Wow, it's been a LONG time since I've seen a application that is shipped on floppy disks. Kudos to Lego for showing you can do something really cool without using hundreds of megs of storage.
Now if they could just port it to Linux, I could play with Legos without losing the pieces.
I've personaly made some molds that make Logo, conectix (and countless other "toys of the year" that don't make it past prototype).
The only missing link in your idea is a means to make the open sourced lego CAD data into an actual lego. Currently, they're running in 24 and 36 out Plastic Injection Molds . These machines are the size of a buss and the price of a few sports cars and not exactly a "desktop solution" for turning open sourced lego CAD data into a viable part.
If you're interested, there is a process called stereo lithography that can "grow" your custom designed lego parts using a UV laser to cure a resin. This process can be had for a little better cost (~50k-100k). The definition and consistancy (they wouldn't snap together, they would 'mush' together) isn't nearly as good as you would get with the presure and heat being used in a PIM, but it could work.
There is a similar rapid proto-typing process that uses a powder sprayed from a inc-jet printer nozzel that hardens after being sprayed. The kewl thing is, you just add water, and your lego crumbles, allowing you to re-use the powder. This makes for a rather weak structure, but it's even more cost effective. ~25-50k.
If more work can be done to the Stereo Lithography process to bring the cost of ownership down, and some material research to increace rigidity, it could be your very own lego factory. _________________________
LegoCAD, a joint venture with AutoDesk by the way, only features parts from the simple machines set. This set, used for teaching engineering principles, has a very limited number of components. Also, it doesn't do animations. (Well, if you want to keep moving the parts and rendering over and over...) Instead, I use LeoCAD or, the even better, MLCAD. Both are based on LDraw, but provide a graphical interface instead of a text based one. More parts than you'll ever need, including old versions of parts.
--
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Just about every kid loves Leggo, so taking advantage of that in the educational arena is a perfect idea! Not only can kids learn about computers and CAD (and computer animation??) but they get to do it in a way that they will like. I think that applications like this will eventually help to eliminate alot of the apathy that is present in our education system (both in the students and the faculty) today. Getting kids excited about learning is the wave of the future!
Ah...it's appears you've confused "Legos" with "L'Eggos", the snap-together waffle breakfast. I can remember many enjoyable hours making fun toys out of these otherwise inedible breakfast treats, asking my Mom to toast just a few more so I can finish what I was building.
Or maybe it was just me.
-- "How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure"
Charles Crumb
But that's not where the fun of Lego is!
by
(void*)
·
· Score: 4
I hate to sound so critical. After all, this is cool. One can really let one's imagination run wild, unlimited by the physical numbers of bricks available. But all CAD software is like that.
The fun of Lego is to build, within the constraints of the number of bricks, and the constraints of physics and engineering, that cool toy you want to have! Half the fun is determining things like "What size of car can I build, since I have only x bricks?". Stuff like that. This teaches a kid mental planning. It's wonderful how such a thing can build tactile and physical experience for small kids!
Not really opposed to this, mind you. Just wondering what it is for. The kid in all of us, I guess.
Another Lego site to check out
by
Grant+Elliott
·
· Score: 4
If you want more information on CAD programs for Lego, go to lugnet They have all sorts of stuff for Lego freaks (like me). You'll probably find the CAD section informative.
--
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Or turn on frustration mode so that the kiddies have to search through 15 minutes of menus just to find the last damn bendy piece, then they find out its stuck to a little black flat piece and they have to wiggle the mouse, then bite one of the buttons for 7 minutes to get it off.
Lego should be covering my medical expenses, I estimate I lost 70% of my tooth enamel as a child trying to free that last damn bendy piece, and there's no way my kids are going to have it any other way.
Slashdot Mirror
leocad
Pretty good too!.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Q: But LEGO CAD isn't even optimized for 32-bit Windows 95 operation. Why not?
A: As a LEGO Dacta product, LEGO CAD was developed primarily for the educational market. As developers, we were faced with producing a program which would run on everything from MAC 68040 machines to Windows 95 and beyond, in a limited amount of time, on a fixed budget.
I really appreciate a company that would explain why the program is slow and un-optimized in the FAQ. Hopefully this program will sell pretty well so they can devote the resources to updating it. It definately looks worth the effort.
There's a community freeware version of this for Windows AND Linux called LeoCAD. It looks pretty cool (although, I admit I haven't tried it). While the Autodesk/Lego one has 63 available pieces, LeoCAD has over 1000! I didn't see anything on the lego dacta page about purchasing (other than where to find distributors), anyone know how much it costs?
/. editors with different interests.
On an offtopic side note, it's funny that they put this story up, but didn't think LeoCAD deserved mention when I submitted it a few months ago. I think there are just too many
which is why you show them leocad instead. Runs on windows and linux
True, but did you look at the distributor list? In the USA, there are a whopping 8 people you can get those 3 disks from.
I really don't understand that decision. I know it's supposed to be for kids, as an educational tool and all that, but with a little repackaging, they could have it on the shelves at every best-buy(tm), Wal-Mart(tm), etc. Every person who walked by who remembered playing with legos as a kid would be tempted...and more than a few would buy.
I've always been dubious about all this virtual stuff the entertainment industry keeps trying to foist on my kids. Seems like kind of a rip-off; we get a bunch of expensive synthetic images, they get all the waterfront real estate. However...
You can't step on a Lego car on the stairs, have your leading foot fly out from under you as the toy car caroms off the wall, fall on your ass, bounce all the way to the bottom, and permanently fuck up your lower back, either. Whereas you CAN do all that with a real toy car, as I did.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
This really reminds me of Douglas Coupland's book, "Microserfs", when a bunch of geeks defect from MS to write "Oop!", an object-oriented lego style program.....if this CAD program is anywhere near as cool as that, I'm _very_ interested.
Cheers,
SuperG
I love the part about...
(warning, quote from memory, may not be right)
"I always wondered about kids who build lego toys out of any color legos, mixing and matching colors, with no order or patterns. I'd hate to see the code that they program nowadays."
Java Virtual Legos.
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I guess I was the only one who was too poor to afford Legos... I often wonder how I would have turned out if I had had the chance to bend my brain around those ugly little blocks while I was a kid.
Now I'm grown and have the money(those Legos are still dang expensive, though), but between the clothes strewn across the floor and the computer parts and ramen wrappers strewn across the tables, I don't have room for them.
LegoCAD seems like the perfect chance to live the childhood I never had, but since it lacks the tactile portion, I don't think it will be same. Oh, well. Maybe in another 20 years.
J. T. MacLeod, weirdo at large
Now if there's ever anything that should be Open Sourced, it's this.
I don't mean the software, necessarily, though that'd be best too.
I mean the blocks - people should be able to design and build custom blocks.
Add behavior/dynamics
Then add a repository, cvs or like SourceForge for these "Open Lego License" blocks that people can have access to, etc.
It's be awesome.
I'm not so sure that this is going to be good for our children. The whole point of legos is to teach our kids about spacial orientation and design. They can have fun while learning basic skills that they will need to physically function as, not just adults, but humans.
Besides - this seems to take the fun out of it all for kids...now they just be like their parents and sit on their asses all day instead in front of a computer. Oh well, i hope this is just a suppliment rather than a replacement for good old fashioned blocks. What's next? Play-do CAD???
-FluX
-------------------------
Your Ad Here!
-------------------------
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Should be able to use XML and a DTD to define your own Lego pieces:
XML
/TOP
/BOTTOM
/PINS
/LEVEL
/LEVELS
/LEGOPIECE
/LEGOPIECES
/XML
LEGOPIECES unit=pin
LEGOPIECE color=##VAR## material=plastic
LEVELS
LEVEL name=BASE
WIDTH10/WIDTH
LENGTH20/LENGTH
HEIGTH4/LENGTH
FILLING NOHOLES=true/ !--otherwise must put coordinates for each hole--
PINS
TOP
PIN l=4 f=4 type=male/
PIN l=8 f=4 type=male/
PIN l=12 f=4 type=male/
PIN l=16 f=4 type=male/
PIN l=4 f=8 type=male/
PIN l=8 f=8 type=male/
PIN l=12 f=8 type=male/
PIN l=16 f=8 type=male/
BOTTOM
PIN l=4 f=4 type=female/
PIN l=8 f=4 type=female/
PIN l=12 f=4 type=female/
PIN l=16 f=4 type=female/
PIN l=4 f=8 type=female/
PIN l=8 f=8 type=female/
PIN l=12 f=8 type=female/
PIN l=16 f=8 type=female/
etc.
You can't handle the truth.
Seriously though, I think this is a great idea, and does have a point.
In class, the kids would be givin a problem, certain restrictions. Then they would have to plan it out first on LegoCAD, before they are allowed to build it.
This would teach the kid an enormous amount of skills, escpecialy in the field of engineering.
It would be just like real engineering project.
I have to say, out of all the toys on the market today, Lego is about the only thing that will keep ur kid ammused, and acctually do some good at the same time. I.e. they use maths and have to mentaly build the model in there head before they build something just to name a couple of skills.
What does G.I.Joe, action man etc. teach ur kids? Guns are cool? Pokemon; buying things makes u happy?
- - -
I am 21 (male) and my sister is 18 (female, duh!), anyways one of her freinds gave here like 3 10 gallon buckets full of legos. Now me, and my geek instances (and childish though pattern) though "WOW!" fucking lego's man, and 30 fucking gallons of them.
I sit down and start going though them, and there are all these fucked up parts I have never seen when I was a kid. There was thousands of lego's, as a kid I loved these fucking things.
So what do I do? I dump them all out and start building a full size coffee table. WTF man, there was like 30 gallons of freaking legos, start with something easy, but since there is so many legos I could build something big!
Remember, this is a 21 year old kid^H^H^H adult smiling and really happy. (lego's are fun).
Anyways I hold a steady job as a system admin, have my own apartment, paying on a car, what some might say as a "productive member of society". The point being, I have
There is nothing wrong with this! Stop judging my LEGO HABIT DAMMIT! It is not like I do it everyday, just once in awhile, and there was 30 fucking gallons of them, have you ever seen 30 fucking gallons of legos, man? Fuck, I bet %99 of slashdot would be atleast intersted in what 30 fucking gallons of lego's look like. Don't fucking judge me on my lego habit dammit, any of you would have done the same thing.
Anyways one of my sisters college freinds (who is extremely hot) (19, female) came in. This chic thinks I am a geek, well because I sit at a computer for 16 hours a day. A loser, because I don't have a girlfreind. A a weirdo, because my social skills are less then par. A pig for referering to the Female gender as "chics" and "women". (She got offened over the word "women"!!!, wtf is the deal with that) And now she see's me on a "lego high" getting my kicks from toys that kids play with.
Admittly it was fun, but it was kinda of embrassering. I seen links in this forum to lego cad programs for Linux, this is good on so many levels.
I can have something that looks like a highly advanced engining computer sceince program on my computer screen, but when in fact I am doing nothing more than playing with lego's.
The moral of the story is:
Chicks don't dig geeks that play with lego's, no matter how many lego's are avaiable.
Chicks don't see the art and science it takes to make a 15 foot battle ship with moving parts from lego's.
Chicks dig complex look GUI 3D programs.
So my question to the slashDOT crowd is; how the hell do you get a girlfreind with OUT compromising your "geek instances"?
&Rant();
sub Rant() {
Is it REALLY that fucking wrong to play with lego's? Is it that potically incorrect? Mark me with the fucking plague, I enjoy lego's under certain sisuations! Tie me up, nail me down, hang me, then sit me on a fucking cross and mock me, for the simple fact I enjoy plastic interlocking blocks! I should be fucking shot in the head for the simple enjoyment of colored plastic interlocking cubes. FUCK! kill me, I am ready to go.
return; }
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
LDraw has been around since early 97. LDraw has several thousand parts available, and a lot of GPL add-on programs.
LDraw.org
If you've tried Gryphon Bricks, ZOI Blocks, Lego Creator or even leocad you can easily tell how clumsy it is to put lego pieces together with the mouse. It's not like a 2D paint program where you just point and click. Instead you point, click, move the arrow keys, click on something else, drag the mouse for a while and then maybe it's in the right spot.
It's a pretty difficult problem, of course, since there's an inherent ambiguity when a 2D mouse coordinate is projected into a 3D world. I worry that this CAD program would be so clumsy it will turn kids off of CAD because they'd rather just use the legos. A cooler product in my mind is Cybones, which uses pieces that aren't so tedious to build with on a computer. And it's more colorful, too.
You must applaud the authors for getting the minimum system specs right, though; most elementary schools don't have the kind of boxes slashdot readers do.
Shameless plug: check out my 3D modeler for kids!
GollyGee Blocks -- 3D creativity software for kids.
But you can't roll a virtual LEGO car down the stairs. Still, if youdve told me that kids would be using a CAD program to play with LEGOs a decade ago, I would have called you nuts. Still sounds plenty nuts (kids need something tangeable to play with), but it looks kinda fun for adults. Itd make planning a fully LEGO PC case a lot easier. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
Hey, anyone ever read the book Microserfs by Douglas Coupland? Wasn't the software that they were coding, a virtual lego building program, where people could build anything out of lego on their computer??
With infinite numbers of any lego piece?
I think they called it OOP..
This sounds a lot like that!
Yay Microserfs! Woo! This was the very first geekish book I ever read
This was back in the days when Microsoft was socialy exceptible
k.
This sounds like Oop! The software they were developing in the book Microserfs by Doug Coupland.
Great! When will the Lego CNC machine come so that I can prototype my lego creations!
Actually, that's the price for an educational site license. A single copy is $49.95!
Oh, NOW you've done it. Have you NO idea what this is going to cause? You've just tempted some geek to use this program to design a jet propulsion engine using only legos...
There's your answer. If it's an educational software, geared towards schools, it goes through 'distributors' and buyers and such... I bet it sells for HUGE bucks too...
:) We played Doom and Descent after school, for hours.). The software that the school system was buying was horrible. Buggy, badly written, amateurish and terribly expensive. It's like buying Aspirin at a Hospital.
I worked in a middle school for a couple of years as a LAN tech (yeah, 50+ workstations, 2 labs, Novell 3.xx - lucky brats.
Now, if Lego was to retarget this software for public consumption, they'd sell MILLIONS at $39.95 at Fry's, E.B. and CompUSA.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Just a warning, Lego Datca used to be for educators only and is still sold primarily through educational resellers (unlike Lego Technics). These resellers vary in their willingness to sell to non-educators. Quite annoying.
- bridgette
Why does the site seem to make it sound like this can only be used with a couple of Dacta sets (specifically 9630/9645)? No where does it mention using it for other sets, though it seems to imply you could "design" your own parts, hence building a Lego component library...
But why should you? Why not just use LDraw or LeoCAD for modeling your Lego creations?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Another popular win32 lego CAD is MLCad, which is compatible with LDRAW.D .htm
http://www.user.xpoint.at/m.lachmann/MLCad/MLCA
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Wow, it's been a LONG time since I've seen a application that is shipped on floppy disks. Kudos to Lego for showing you can do something really cool without using hundreds of megs of storage.
Now if they could just port it to Linux, I could play with Legos without losing the pieces.
The only missing link in your idea is a means to make the open sourced lego CAD data into an actual lego. Currently, they're running in 24 and 36 out Plastic Injection Molds . These machines are the size of a buss and the price of a few sports cars and not exactly a "desktop solution" for turning open sourced lego CAD data into a viable part.
If you're interested, there is a process called stereo lithography that can "grow" your custom designed lego parts using a UV laser to cure a resin. This process can be had for a little better cost (~50k-100k). The definition and consistancy (they wouldn't snap together, they would 'mush' together) isn't nearly as good as you would get with the presure and heat being used in a PIM, but it could work.
There is a similar rapid proto-typing process that uses a powder sprayed from a inc-jet printer nozzel that hardens after being sprayed. The kewl thing is, you just add water, and your lego crumbles, allowing you to re-use the powder. This makes for a rather weak structure, but it's even more cost effective. ~25-50k.
If more work can be done to the Stereo Lithography process to bring the cost of ownership down, and some material research to increace rigidity, it could be your very own lego factory.
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LegoCAD, a joint venture with AutoDesk by the way, only features parts from the simple machines set. This set, used for teaching engineering principles, has a very limited number of components. Also, it doesn't do animations. (Well, if you want to keep moving the parts and rendering over and over...) Instead, I use LeoCAD or, the even better, MLCAD. Both are based on LDraw, but provide a graphical interface instead of a text based one. More parts than you'll ever need, including old versions of parts.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Just about every kid loves Leggo, so taking advantage of that in the educational arena is a perfect idea! Not only can kids learn about computers and CAD (and computer animation??) but they get to do it in a way that they will like. I think that applications like this will eventually help to eliminate alot of the apathy that is present in our education system (both in the students and the faculty) today. Getting kids excited about learning is the wave of the future!
The fun of Lego is to build, within the constraints of the number of bricks, and the constraints of physics and engineering, that cool toy you want to have! Half the fun is determining things like "What size of car can I build, since I have only x bricks?". Stuff like that. This teaches a kid mental planning. It's wonderful how such a thing can build tactile and physical experience for small kids!
Not really opposed to this, mind you. Just wondering what it is for. The kid in all of us, I guess.
If you want more information on CAD programs for Lego, go to lugnet They have all sorts of stuff for Lego freaks (like me). You'll probably find the CAD section informative.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
This might be a good time to mention LeoCAD, a similar program which has a Linux version.
Or turn on frustration mode so that the kiddies have to search through 15 minutes of menus just to find the last damn bendy piece, then they find out its stuck to a little black flat piece and they have to wiggle the mouse, then bite one of the buttons for 7 minutes to get it off.
Lego should be covering my medical expenses, I estimate I lost 70% of my tooth enamel as a child trying to free that last damn bendy piece, and there's no way my kids are going to have it any other way.
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