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Engineers Use Legos, Too!
jconley writes: "Excite is carrying a story discussing how engineers are using Legos, not just kids! Interesting read, dives a bit into the history of Legos and Mindstorm. You can read the story here. "
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The top 10 reasons engineers don't use kids:
:)
10. Kids aren't colourful enough
9. You can't get 2000 kids in a standard plastic box.
8. A model made entirely of kids will get you put away
7. You can't get the really usefully shaped kids these days
6. Kids have to go to school
5. No mindstorms - where would you put the batteries?
4. Half way through building, the model would bugger off for dinner!
3. You can't get buld orders of kids through the internet
2. Well not legally
And the top reason engineers don't use kids?
1. Engineers aren't allowed access to kids
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
So "real" engineers never try out new ideas with scale models?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I've been playing with legos since i was a small child...wow. I cannot get enough of them. When I got a Mindstorms set for Christmas two years ago (and the 1.5 upgrade pack this christmas) I was overjoyed. Easily the coolest toy I've ever gotten. /academic/ research), because it's just so darn cheap, and it's easy to build a functional robot quickly. Design changes in programming and structure can be changed in minutes. And unlike "real" robots used often enough in /serious/ research, you can attach cool little wings and lightsabers and lasercannon and such to lego robots =).
But the fact of the matter is: it is much more than a toy. I've found, being an AI sort of computer geek, that it's not a bad testbed for research (/serious/
I say it's no good if you can't have a sense of humour about it.
just my $0.02
Hello, Lego is a kids toy, not some kind of magic prototyping tool for professional engineers. It seems that a lot of people here on /. are "engineer wannabes" who wish that they were able to do something practical, but cannot do anything apart from sys admin Linux boxes. All the time in the world spent playing with your plastic bricks won't change that, and it's sad to try really.
I agree with your point, in that lego is not suitable as a prototyping tool for the vast majority of applications. It's not sturdy enough, you can't tailor the pieces to a particular application.
That said, it does have another purpose, which I think is just as important: stimulating the imagination. While Lego might not be the ideal tool for building prototypes, it does offer a cheap and easy way of 'thinking out loud', and that can spark ideas for real designs of real machines. IMHO one of the major problems facing the various different engineering industries at the moment is that the working environment stifles creativity and imagination. If these people are using lego to break free of that, and start the creative process going, then all the best to them.
I would like to see high temperature Lego. The rockets I made as a kid with Lego would only last two trips. Same with the rocket powered cars - these only lasted one trip because usually they hit the garage wall hard, followed with a very impressive Lego shower. At the time I did not realise how expensive Lego was, so my collection quickly dwindled to melted lumpy bits. Other than destructive creations high temperature Lego could be used for Oil "Aromatherapy" kits, miniature kilns (to melt Smurfs in?), etc. They could be supplied with instructions of how to make your own rocket fuel packs with 63% Potassium Nitrate, 17% Icing sugar and 10% sulphur with a black powder core.
C.Burgess - email:colvinb@airnet.com.au
...by the competition, specifically Mattel. (geek-unfriendly Mattel, from what I read here on /.)
:-)
A little more than a year ago I was working as a designer for the Mattel Toylab, a "toy think tank" that developed product in conjunction with Intel's Smart Toy Lab (in Portland) and other Mattel divisions. We went out and bought a Mindstorms, with the expressed purpose to open the box and build a working robot within an hour without reading the instructions. Well, no one managed to do it... Mindstorms is too complex for no-brainer assembly, which is a large part of the appeal for engineers and the like.
However, Mattel's audience consists mainly of children 3-10, so we were tasked with the creation of a "no brainer Mindstorms robot." We came up with a sphere-shaped central driver unit, radio controlled or pre-programmable a la "Big Track," with snap on robot-accessories (it would come with two utility arms, the others would be sold seperately, of course
The idea was to sell a robot that kids could have up and running within minutes of opening the box, yet still have a feeling of "pride of construction" (from snapping on the arms etc.) Software included with the robot would allow kids to simulate how much better their robot could be if they went out and bought the extra accessories (essentially an advertisement masquerading as educational software).
The project got to the prototype phase, but then stalled- partly due to Mattel's financial trouble causing the company to stop looking forward, and start falling back on "safe" bets (a bad idea IMHO) but also due to the fact it would have been too cheap! The robot would have sold for $40-$60 (not surprising, considering it was just a tarted-up remote control vehicle- programming was limited to "movement macros") and thus would be "losing" the $140-$120 that Mindstorms was capturing. By the time I left Mattel for a dot-com startup, I was seeing far more complex robots being prototyped, but these were mainly from the Intel portion of the lab, and were all-in-one solutions- no assembly required. Most involved remote surveillance via video and sound transmitted wirelessly to your PC from a radio controlled "robot."
So, don't be surprised if the next robots to market sport an "Intel Inside" sticker!
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Why would engineers use Kids? And why is Lego better than Kids?
Other great Lego hacks:
- If you can hack a little FORTH, you can make a Mindstorms toy attached to someone's Solaris or SGI box seek out and store their password file when the toy is powered up. I don't know why, but there's something which appeals to my warped sense of humour in building a little model of a Trojan Horse, which is itself a Trojan
:-) - I once made a lego "exoskeleton" for my left hand while playing guitar in a thrashadelic metal band. Basically an intertial doohickey that tapped down a fret above my pinky finger, giving me access to extended reach and some wild chromatic licks, when playing in the right key.
- The plastic axles from a Technics kit are just the ticket if you want to unscrew the cooling fan from most Mac models, but don't have the right Allen key
- Those little rubber tyres can be used as sealing O-rings in all models of the Space Shuttle before Atlantis, if you can't find the right part. But fer chrissakes don't let them get cold overnight; that's bad shit.
- And finally, with a bit of skill, a motorised Technics kit, and a pound and a half of liver (warmed in a microwave), you can hack up a reasonable subsititute for female company.
Happy Lego hackingYou mean kids also play with lego?
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-