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

First Slashdotted lego block too

[Rhonwyn]

Server temporarily unavailable due to heavy load.
Please try again in a few minutes.

We killed it. The first lego block to take a step into the grand open world of the web, and its slashdotted beyond any sense of hope.

"Its worse than that, he's dead Jim!"

Next efforts?

[Chagatai]

Next thing you know, he overclocks his Duplos, builds a CPU case out of Lincoln Logs, and uses Tinkertoys as an eight-way USB hub....

Cruel, cruel timothy...

[JordanH]

Slashdotting a poor defenseless Commodore 64...

Have you no shame?

Re:Cruel, cruel timothy...

[JonWan]

Maybe they should upgrade to a Commodore 128. It runs at 2Mhz.

Won't someone think of the children?

[soulsteal]

What happens when one of the bricks gets the Slashdot Effect? I forsee smoldering Lego structures and very frightened toddlers.

Talk about clusters of webservers!

[Seth Finkelstein]

I can't wait to see the experiments in configuration of server topologies.
Maybe there should also be little sysadmin lego-people?

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

slashdotted already

[icejai]

Hope he's not using that thing as his webserver though...

Here's the text for those of you who reach a "server overload" message.

Subject:
true tcp/ip on the RCX

From:
"Olaf"
Olaf Christ

Newsgroups:
lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos

Date:
Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:16:29 GMT

View Raw
Message

I ve got the very first and only tcp/ip enabled RCX in my room, cool, eh ?
I will make a webpage at the end of the week to make the very first
(rudimentary, but working) version available to the public.
Right now, the tcp/ip stack is compiled into the kernel and the stack calls
the usercode itself.
The code to pass the incoming packets to the stack and to send packets to the
pc is currently running as a simple userprogram. (*.lx).
On the pc the lnpd runs a program that acts as a gateway between the tower
and the pc.
This gateway passes the packets coming from the tower to e.g. 192.168.0.1
and sends packets from 192.168.0.1 to the rcx.
Right now the only thing you can do is pinging the RCX.
But writing e.g. a very small webserver shouldnt be that big a deal ;-)
Because, lnp is still alive i had to disable the sound support to free some
RAM.
Right now i got approx. 3 KB RAM left, still enough to do a lot of useful
stuff.
I think, the best way to fully integrate the tcp/ip-stack into the
Legos-kernel would be replacing lnp by a tiny slip-driver.
On the pc we could get rid of the lnpd.

Olaf Christ

Here's an idea:

[funkhauser]

Hook your Lego Mindstorm box up to the internet, attach a small LCD screen, and program it to check autopr0n periodically. Then it could drive around and find you to alert you to freshly-posted pr0n! YES!

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.

Server

[lavaforge]

I can't wait until somebody exploits a bug in this:

Bill, son, that's very nice, but why do all of your lego blocks spell out 1 0WNZ J00?

Now they've done it...

[Nick Smith]

Net-enabled lego-blocks, communicatng with each other... this is exactly how SkyNet got its start.

Sure, it starts with cute rocketships, next thing you know there'll be Hunter-Killer 'bots the size of houses, made entirely of lego.

To think that the end of humanity (until John Connor of course) should come out of Denmark...

DMCA or no DMCA ?

[J.D. Hogg]

I have to be a party-pooper, but doesn't this violate the DMCA ? and to my knowledge, Lego doesn't much like people who rev-engineer their brick.

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?

Sun's Jini?

[atomray]

The concept of adding self-contained "bricks" of hardware/software to build functionality in a system of devices sounds a lot like the goals of Sun's Jini project, not necessarily limited to traditional computing applications though.

and in recent news

[ryusen]

Microsoft responding to this new market has announced an IIS enabled lego brick. The IIS Lego Brick mesures 8"x5"x1", features a special edition of WinXP for Lego, and is fully .net enabled.
It's estimated reatil price is going to be $688.95 and will be available q3 of this year.
Inside sources at Microsoft reveailed a new "bumb" schema for "MSLego(tm)" that adds new "features," but may make it incompatable with industry standard Lego "bumps."

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

[fmaxwell]

... all stuck together.