Slashdot Mirror
The Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer
lizardboy writes: "This is for the Lego loving computer geek with large backup needs. The Lego DAT Tape changer. It can be interfaced with any platform supporting Lego mindstorms. I have used it with OSX and Linux using dump and NQC with some custom shell scripts. It also works under a Mac OS 9 using Retrospect and RCX."
... the lego Rubik's cube solver : that thing was so cool !
Can it be setup to hit the reboot key on the Lego Webserver?
:)
That'd be mighty spiffy.
Anybody else remember those old computerized Lego sets for the AppleIIs? I wonder if those could be interfaced to the mind storms, I know of a school that has quite a few of those lying around, it is just that all of their AppleII interface boards died.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I wonder how many boxes of legos would be required to emulate the 300+ cartridge loaded in one of the data centers at work.
At least replacement parts would be inexpensive!
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Where are the little Lego people? This is cool, but it seems a more effective presentation would include the little lego figures into this contraption. Put some on the lift, some with construction gear, some at the base with the control unit in lab coats working on mini control panels. Some at the local coffee machine or guiding a tour, etc.
:P
Still a very cool way of setting up a changer, but it would be more fun to add some realism to it
He needs to build a full Silo out of Legos. Something 6 feet in diameter that will hold several thousand DAT tapes. I wonder just how many bricks that would take...
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
I don't know why I would think of this, but at where I currently work, there is a very large area between where all of the computers are, and if there is something that could make the tape backup process even more automated, it would be better. Time could be spent on better things, like figuring out how to slowly learn how to not use microsoft products, or actually fixing computers. imagine, this could save 5 minutes at least whenever a tape backup is needed, that really adds up with incrimental backups, or especially if there are regular full backups, more tapes to be changed.
The color scheme is something no marketing department will ever agree to. He should have used more beige blocks.
I also think that it should have some of the littel lego men standing around looking at the thing. Also needs more flashing lights.
...but I'd rather invest 40 bucks in an autoloader that understands SCSI commands...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
/me dives into his closet looking for his old macintosh and his legos with a SPARKLE in his eye.
From the looks of this thing it also loads a DAT tape of the inventor snoring, and waves a fake arm around in the bed, if his Mom turns his bedroom door handle when he's taking a day off...
...Oh god how many Matthew Broderick references can slashdot handle in a single day!
:)
Hey! How about that? Meta-Whining :)!
Seriously, it's part of the community and the escape. Just roll your eyes and move onto the next post.
bah, it does not do the lot in the RCX's :(
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
These fscking slideshows made with iTools don't work in mozilla.
Ciao,
--Ben
Wouldnt it be cool if lego made actual tools that werent marketed towards kids. Such that they would be designed to do things of this nature, all purpose reusable engineering kits. Not that I'm too cool for lego's or anything...
Then I'd actually be able to use my CD-R/RW burner for back-ups. (I know - not the ideal device, it's just what I have available)
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
http://drew.corrupt.net/lp/series1.html
>
Ahh yes, and here's where we have our fully redundant Linux cluster with an uptime of 2 years. If anything does ever go wrong, we have a Lego Mindstorms backup system in place. I think we can trust that the database will never be lost.
And here we have...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
The Loader
From the right
Load and unload slides
Tape being unloaded
Arm loader from the rear
system to eject tape
Back of loader
Lifting system
Not necessarily... I helped run a Lego Robotics competition for gradeschool kids last year-- it's amazing what some of these kids managed to get the Mindstorm kits to do. This addition is only going to add on to that creativity...
Ahh....but does it sport a six nines availability rating? From the looks of it, more like 4,5 tops. Maybe it just needs a little hot glue...
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
My son is two. He plays with Lego, and Duplos (which I believe _can_ be pluralized.) Dan, my son, does _not_ have a job. He goes to school, but, he plays with Lego bricks when he's there (note how I neatly avoided pluralizing Lego!) so that doesn't count.
I think if you are playing with a product like Lego to accomplish something you might have too much time on your hands.
My son certainly does. And this guy... a Mac loading up to iTools (s/b sTools for SLOW) he must be sick with all the free time he's enjoying.
This
...yeah but their technical support is aweful.
I had to listen to 15 minutes or so of baby gurgling on the phone before speaking to a tech they call "mother". Maybe some obscure Dan Aykroyd reference.
Then, finaly, when a tech arrived at my office, all he did was cry and suck on ejector mechanism.
I'm never buying from this company again.
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I'll only be happy with Legos when they can brew me up a perfect cup of coffee.....
Nate Tobik
ahh, the egg in the basket..
if I replaced the "tape drive" with a crayon, and the set of tapes with Index Cards, I could use it as a redunt "CowboyNeal w/Index Cards and a Crayon"...
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I want to build a lego robot that does nothing but hit refresh in my web browser and check slashdot for new stories, and then submits first post! w00t
-I'll Bash you in the forhead.
Lizard Boy
haha I know the feeling
;)
after liquidating my everquest character (read, got a bunch of extra cash) recently for 500$ I imediatly invested 400 on legos..
my roomate thinks I'm a bit stange, and i'm prety sure I'm never going to get laid again ^.^
damn you slashdot!!!
at least I was able to use www.lego.com/bulk
I live in a giant bucket.
you know, you should archive these somewhere, I'd be interested in re-reading them sometime.
Thats actually kinda interesting (even if it is way offtopic)
I live in a giant bucket.
Very cool; I can now say we are a nation with too much time on our hands....it is damn cool though.
-ted
I go to the site and all I see is a bunch of pics which link to larger versions of said pics. With text at the bottom, being w/o a linux drive working all I can do is look through XP. Is the site changed or is it not really a slide show??? If I had my linux drive not die would i be able to boot that up and see an error, or was there a neat slide show taken down???
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
If seen from above:
I think that dupping a cd is easy - but labeling it after is the time consuming part. You could also handle multiple CD drives at a time.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I don't buy it. I grew up on the real thing; solid metal. Legos were cheesy crap play toys against an honest-to-god Erector Set.
Why, in my day, you were measured by the amout of metal you owned. Erector and Tonka were it. Everything else was cheap garbage.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Does this make anyone else feel like they're playing Max Payne? =P
Lego is obviously good for prototyping these sorts of products, but it would be cool if there was a Lego compiler that would scan the completed model and produce parts by eliminating all but the minimum number of inter-connections required for efficient assembly, and replacing the Lego connectors with more permanent ones.
..is a lego DAT tape changer, which can not only change DAT tapes, but build more copies of itself, given the appropriate lego blocks required. These in turn would create more..
...to think that some people say Macs are just toys!
Yes, you can. See here.
So, this would mean that now I have actual justification to submit a purchase order for Lego. :)
Superb
Radars, space guns, rockets, blinking coloured lights, and a little dude in a visored helmet with a spanner at a console... Ian
How does OSX handle tape backup? Is it more like Windows, Linux, or Mac OS 9?
Tape media is by far the cheapest media, the problem with it is that you usually need many tapes.
This means that you have to swap tapes in and out of the tape drives. There's two ways of doing this:
1: Manually.
2: Robotic tape library or autoloader.
No1: Is a pain in the arse and unreliable.
No2: Is very expensive, making it cheaper to use other methods of backup, like cheap disks.
So there *is* a case and a market for cheap tape libraries which you can plug your existing drives into.
Deleted
DAT tapes are used for backups.
Christ do they let just *anyone* in here?
Deleted
Party-Optimizer uses such thing
Think of anything else that a Mindstorm can help you to change... ah... toilet papers.
This is the coolest geek project I have seen in awhile, now I need to dust off my old dat drive and find some legos cheap. Is there any chance for detail instructions on some of the more intricate parts of the system? I would love to be able to build one on my own. Anyother pictures available or instructions?
Since they always want to do things on a budget, I told him I could build a Lego tape changer for a mere pittance. He wouldn't go for it though.
Something about not being fault tolerant...
Still, I'll bet it's fun to watch! The site needs some .mpgs to illustrate this doohickey in motion...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
After two years of research, crunching numbers on dozens of computers using parallel processing, I have discovered the reason for this phenomena.
Result: They have too much time on their hands.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I believe the title of the page says "The LEGO Date Tape Loader".
Wasn't there a segment about that in the 1957 classic Amazon Women on the Moon? You know, the one with Andrew Dice Clay.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
lego this and lego that...what the hell. why not use real parts instead of stupid plastic bricks. tcp/ip enabled lego bricks, now back up in a lego WHY!!!
Your no good older brother comes by and smashes your changer to bits and pieces, as they tend to do with legos. But that's half the fun with em... build something... DESTROY IT! Maybe it's just me...
today is spelling optional day.
actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:
the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)
and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.
And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.
When I was a kid, I was proud to make something looked kinda sorta like an airplane.
It sure as hell didn't fly or do anything spectacular.
Well, it did come apart if I dropped it.
First, like so many others in this thread, let me say that the force is strong in this one.
From what I can figure from the pictures, it does ejection the same way that it does picking -- counting on the little lip on the bottom of the cartridge to stick out far enough that the matching hump on the end of the spatula can grab it.
The problem is that since I have an HP DDS-3 drive, I won't be able to count on that mechanism because unfortunately when it ejects the cartrdige, the bottom slide is still in the open position. Actually pulling the cartridge out is what closes it. So the "lip" isn't there. One would have to give the picker some sort of horizontal tweezers to pinch the cartridge and back it out. That sounds rather difficult, unfortunately.
Wow! I can't believe someone on /. actually knows how to correctly use the words "there", "their", and "they're"! Next thing you know, someone will lose a few loose screws from his computer case...
This is an ex-parrot!
Have you ever tried destroying a lego brick, there almost indestructible (Just step on a pile of them at 4 AM, i bet you will break before they do). Now i can see your point if say they were tyco bricks, but legos are some quality shit :)
I will bend your mind with my spoon
I grew up with erector sets -- the older part of my set (from the 1950's) was pretty strong, but very heavy. The later stuff had "beams" stamped from the thinnest possible metal, you had to bolt 4 of them together in a box beam to get any strength. Legos were a little pricy for my family. (Plastic resins are expensive by the pound, although forming them into intricate shapes is cheap. Carbon steel is amazingly cheap in bulk, but making something out of it can get pretty expensive. Erector set pieces, except the screws and nuts, were made by rolling and stamping, which is as cheap as metal-forming gets if the quantities are large enough.)
I think Legos would be as strong or stronger than the later Erector sets if you glued the bricks together. One brick is pretty strong. Trouble is, if you used a strong glue, the pieces are no longer re-usable...
How in the hell was that a Troll!!?? Are you moderators on crack or something? Have no sense of humor?
He could just rape duck tape around the Lagos to increase strenth. ON a secound thought a duck tape tape loader would be nice.
Geeks love LEGOs.
Sapere Aude - Homer
Now I can proudly say "I'm from Denmark!" and to those who might not know about the magic LEGO DAT Tape Loader I can say "We make incredible machines in Denmark!".
Frederik Grøn Schack
So my comment about something being unworthy of mod points is itself worthy of being modded down. Sad to see such a lack of worthwhile posts. Do people even read the mod guidelines?
Actually, it reminds me more of Deus Ex.
Is your company running tools written by ma