TCP/IP Enabled Lego Brick

An anonymous reader submits: "Yesterday, Olaf Christ announced that he has the world's first TCP/IP-enabled Lego brick that can be used as a web server. Imagine the possibilities of connecting your collection of Lego Mindstorms to the Internet! He has ported the extremely small uIP TCP/IP stack to the Lego Mindstorms platform. uIP has also been used to run a Commodore 64 as a web server, and is ported to the 8-bit Ataris and laptop keyboard microcontrollers."

Comments

Re:Cruel, cruel timothy...

[TClevenger]

Slashdotting a poor defenseless Commodore 64...

Have you no shame?

Kinda like sandblasting a soup cracker, isn't it?

Oh well

[rice_burners_suck]

This is the most amazing technology I've ever heard of. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, the whole "Lego" technology would be developed so well that it will begin to apply to a lot of computer hardware in general, so that when you wish to construct a network, you'll pick out a bunch of "blocks", put them together much like toys, and power them up. Want a web server? Simply add this "brick" to your system. The bricks don't necessarily have to look like toys, but the idea is about the same: miniture little devices that perform one operation and perform it well, which can be combined in any numbers and any combination to produce some effect. The processing for any given task might automatically distribute itself across all the processors in the system that perform that operation.

Oh well.

RAM HOG!

[pnatural]

From his post:

Right now i got approx. 3 KB RAM left, still enough to do a lot of useful
stuff.

Oh, lordie, if every programmer had that kind of attitude...

New ways to communicate. New ways to be creative!

[cnladd]

As a fellow Mindstorms owner, this is incredibly interesting. I'm not that great of a builder myself - not compared with some of the folks I've seen on the 'net - but I'm looking into ways right now to get multiple bricks (RCX's) to communicate with each other.

Now with the ability to pass TCP/IP traffic back and forth, that opens up even greater avenues of possibility for device communication. Not only can you create software that will allow you (or someone over the web) to interact with the devices directly, it's now easier to get the RCX's to interact with other devices. One great example would be to have a brick as a part of a security system. How about intergrating it with an X10 system? Turn your robot on with the flick of a wall switch.

This just isn't a case of "let's port Apache to a Lego RCX brick!" The fact that these things are the brains of such a flexible system, with a wide variety of sensors, really opens up a great deal of possibility. More importantly, it allows for even more creativity and learning. After all, that's what these devices were made for, right?