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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.
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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
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.
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!
:)
Yeah, but that one is a DDS-2 and it is limited to a 4 tape cartridge. His is scalable as far as he wishes to go with it. He can change the tape drive (go for a DDS3)or number of tape drives without any concern for the size of a cartridge for tapes, or the type of tape that it takes given it is 4mm and can be hooked the way he's grabbing tapes.
That said, I know some idiot will probably trip over his autoloader one day and he'll have to answer for the downtime to put the lego system back together. That will be one impressive interoffice memo (yes, our data recovery system is crippled until we can bring in some third graders to reassemble it...).
bbh
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...
In this decade, we don't use casettes
Yeah, but some of us use DAT tapes to back up our hard drives...
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
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
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.
it's the custom JavaScript that gets automagically put into the iTools photo albums. FWIW, they don't work in Opera PPC either.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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
Lizard Boy
Very true, and what if the cleaning lady came in one morning and sucked up half the autoloader! All that ingenuity (and lego pieces) gone, and I'm not sure insurance would even cover it.
bbh
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.
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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..
So, this would mean that now I have actual justification to submit a purchase order for Lego. :)
Superb
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
I have some of those cue cat devices. Various projects exist on freshmeat to print bar codes.
I'd feel half inclined to do it myself, but I have too many hobby projects needing attention already. Also, I'd use CDs rather than tapes.