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LEGO Tech Still Going Strong
zimage writes to tell us that Andrew Carol has designed and built a working Babbage Difference Engine out of LEGO. From the article: "Before the day of computers and pocket calculators, all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine. [...] Babbage's design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits." In related, but not quite as functional, news DigitalDame2 writes to tell us that PC Magazine has an interview with LEGO "brick-artist" Nathan Sawaya, creator of their commissioned LEGO PC. There are also several pictures of the creation in addition to a contest to win the snap-together sculpture.
This is really great to see a working Babbage computer out of legos, its not as accurate as Babbage's design...but amazing none the less. Too bad Babbage didn't have legos when he was trying to get funding to build his computer! The lego PC mock ups are nice, but nothing compares to a real working mechanical lego computer :-P
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
Here's real integration of LEGO and computing, the first rev was MIT's Brick, now this...
t w=wn_tophead_1
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69946-0.html?
Very nice! Give this guy the geek award for the year! Let's just hope the organ grinders don't find out about him and drive him nuts until he dies...
Computers.
Note also that ENIAC's inended design purpose was to produce ballistic firing tables for Army artillery during WWII.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
These Lego case mods are cool too!
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I hope for them they don't host the page on a difference engine
That is one thing that pisses me off. people dont realise that lego is a brand, not an objectt. it is refered to as "Pieces of lego" not Legos :P
:)
As for lego technology though i cant wait for the new Lego inteligent brick to come out. The NXT looks like a sexy piece of robotics and a big improvement to the RCX
The Digg effect beat Slashdot to it - they had this ages ago
Here is a quote from the man himself which is amazingly still relevant!
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'
I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Your thoughts form your reality.
Bring on the links! A favorite of mine-- Cable camera rig.
When you by Lego products, you help offset the Muslims in their attempt to cause damage to Denmark, and you defend freedom of speech for all of Western Civilization!
I built a Lego Turing Machine using only 1x1 blocks.
has a nice large article in it about Lego, which basically states that "Lego will do for robotics what iPod has done for music".
Thats a pretty huge claim - Lego's were something I was interested in when I was 5-6 years old, putting together those $100 kits my parents would buy for me.
It also seems to me that the image of the company is what's going to detract attention from any serious accomplishments. It's kind of like Toys 'R' Us getting in to the nuclear power industry - nobody would really take it seriously, because of the brand name.
I think Lego should consider doing whatever they can to shake the "just for kids" image, possibly selling stuff through another company with a different name, in order to really get attention for what they're doing.
Lego is not going strong. As a matter of fact they're going through their worst crisis ever. Recently, they sold off their theme park "Lego Land" to a capital fund. Their problems are mainly decreasing sales due to illegal copies manufactured in Asia, but also similar toys manufactured in Asia. So, Lego faces a challenge. The danish factories are very effective and produce high quality, but the pay is many times higher than if they outsource. Yet, they core of Lego is their headquarters in Billund, Denmark. If they move everything to the east, would it still be Lego?
One of the owners og Lego, the millionaire Kirk, has personally piped funds from him to Lego in an effort to ressurect the company. It seems like it's working, but Lego will probably end up with a loss in this fiscal year as it has the last 5 years.
Some older references opine that Babbage failed because the parts and the mechanical engineering of the day just weren't up to the job of building a calculating machine.
That was always questionable -- after all, England had high-precision chronometers the century before Babbage -- but if you can build a Difference Engine out of flexy plastic and gears designed for use in toys, then problems with brass are no excuse.
The other theory is that the Babbage projects failed because he kept making design changes during assembly.
Oh, and Wow. All bow to the new alpha nerd!
Nah, probably LegOS ;)
During the movie at one point they had to calculate something, I forget what, so they all took out slide rules.
I couldn't figure out why not an electric calculator until I realized it was the early '70s when they were rare.
Or at least rules were faster when needed to be done quickly.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Lego's home Kray super computer. Okay it's the size of a small city and takes a couple of hundred years to assemble but imagine all the geek points you'd get for assembling one!
I like the lego sculptures (if you follow the link to the lego PC creator's site). Especially the Letterman head. Now let's see him do Mohammed.
Am I the only one who thought it would be a working PC, with the case made out of legos? That'd be a lot cooler, IMHO. The mouse might be a little annoying to hold, though...
I remember the "old" days of Lego. Sure, you had kits that came out to something, but it was all made up of standardized parts. You had a bunch of 2x4s, a handful of 1x6s, some flat, some tall, and you could build that model they thought up.
Or you could throw them together with the rest of your stuff and build something else.
Today's lego is pre-set. You have like 10 parts that you need to puzzle together, and that's it. Where's the fun? I had way more fun building my toys than playing with them! I remember those days fondly where me and a friend spent days building some really cool models.
Unfortunately my youth was before programmable Lego Technics. Don't want to think what could have been...:)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
why people have enough time for these things!! I need to sleep!!
politic in spanish & my blog
There are some nice add-ons for POV-Ray that generate Lego parts, so you can play with them in a virtual environment.
eg
http://www.ldraw.org/
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
There is no 'S'!
;)
It's 'LegO' duh.
Am I the only one who thought it would be a working PC, with the case made out of legos? That'd be a lot cooler, IMHO. The mouse might be a little annoying to hold, though...
:-)
You mean something like this? Or maybe you prefer Mac?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Now I understand where that came from.
Win at the track betting on the ponies!
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
A working PC would be difficult, but you can build simple mechanical logic gates in Lego. If you build enough, then you can create a simple general purpose computer. Possibly not actually useful, but certainly a worthwhile learning experience.
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It's Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (and the woman for whom the Ada language was named)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
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I think it's interesting how that's been assembled. Rather than using the regular Lego plastic shafts (the sort of X-shaped ones, or rather 'round with 4 deep angle grooves cut into them at 90-degree intervals'), he's used regular machine screws and hardware. It kind of reminds me more of an Erector set than Legos, in terms of how it's built.
I have to admit I'm sad that Erector seems to have gone the way of the dodo (although Meccano is still around), although Legos are definitely superior in terms of ease-of-use, I did have a soft spot for them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Better than that, there was actually a 3D "building blocks" (they weren't really Legos) program called Gryphon Bricks. (Possibly 'Bricks 3D'.)
w s/gryphonbricks.htm
i d=297
I just looked it up and it seems as though the company has gone kaput, making me belive the program is probably abandoned. (Release date was Sep 1996.) I have the actual retail box around somewhere.
I was kind of a neat concept, but honestly I found that arranging bricks via the mouse was considerably more difficult and less intuitive than putting them together by hand. One of the program's features, IIRC, was that you could put together a model in VR and then it would print a parts list for you. I suppose on very complex models that might have been useful, but I always felt like it would be easier to build the model by hand, take some Polaroids, and then take it apart to get the parts list.
Anyway, it was a neat little program anyway, usefulness to 'Lego designers' nonwithstanding. It was fun if you were on a plane or something and just wanted to have a game to play that wasn't competitive but wasn't as ass-achingly boring as four hours worth of Minesweeper.
And aside from the obvious weaknesses inherent in trying to move a physical-world building toy into the virtual one, it was a very well thought-out program. It was even AppleScriptable, which allowed for some interesting hacks.
Information:
http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/revie
Demo (MacOS 7.1 or later, OS X under Classic):
http://mac.the-underdogs.org/index.php?show=game&
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
will this hurt my feet when i set on it in the middle of the night because my kid missed it when he picked up his legos? OHH god how those things peirce the skin of hte foot. :(
do they run Linux?
The first Difference Engine I built could do 2nd order differences to 3 digits. The second machine (the one I posted at http://acarol.woz.org/ had better carry timing and was built to the same 2nd order/3 digit size, but is capable of being expanded to 4 digits and 3rd order differences.
I've had a lot of people ask for directions on how to make it, so I'm cleaning up the design to be easier than it currently is. Mostly making the adder rotors removable and making the power drive gear box a distinct module.
Some day I'm hoping to do a mini-analytic engine. Perhaps three or four registers, a simple ALU, programmed through a gear chain. This will require a lot of thought.
So this is what Apple meant when they said they'd do amazing things with the Intel CPU.
> Andrew Carol has designed and built a working Babbage Difference Engine out of LEGO
So much for the "19th century engineering couldn't actually build such a thing" BS. I wanna see one made out of wood as carved by hatchet!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.