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RIMM's LEGO Machines Test Blackberry
LEGO - my - Crackberry writes "Matthias Wandel is an engineer at Research in Motion (RIMM), the company that makes the Blackberry. What did RIMM turn to for testing the antenna reception of one of its 900MHz devices? LEGO machines. Specifically a device made of LEGO that could rotate a Blackberry about its horizontal & vertical axis in a pre-defined pattern."
Check out his site. He's been building amazing stuff for years. I first stumbled on it when I was researching spud guns. He even made his own pipe organ.
I'm not. It seems like a logical choice.
Want to test different angles precisely? Use some sort of robot.
Only going to build it once, and want it to be easy to build? Use Legos.
Need only rudimentary instructions (e.g. "rotate for 0.2 seconds") to rotate something on said robot? Use Mindstorms.
Nothing beats the satisfaction of soldering one's own circuit board and programming in C, but for something quick, easy to use, and powerful, Legos are the best solution.
We're all familiar with the storm of patents ending with "on the internet." Perhaps now there will be a new storm of patent claims ending with "using Lego."
That really *is* Research In Motion!
Cool idea, but I wonder how long the device would hold out. LEGO isn't exactly designed for industrial apps. On the other hand, it is designed for small children, who provide perhaps the toughest test environment imaginable!
I figure if you're going to write an article about RIM's activities, you had best get the name right. It is 'RIM', not 'RIMM'. Both the /. article, and TFA have it wrong....
I am astounded!
anon
Real geeks use(d) Fischer-Technik. More possibilities, less colors. I built robots with it 20 years ago ...
Got my 11 year old a Mindstorm set. It is incredible both in the mechanics and software. I was at Disney World and saw the robotic plastic injection machine and the display panel looked just like the Mindstorm programming interface.
Not to diss what RIM has done (old lego set) but I am surprised that we don't read more about Mindstorms at work.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Now I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon thinking of how I can incorporate LEGO into the testing of the products we produce.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
At the risk of being modded down... surely by now everyone here ought to know that if you say "legos" not "lego" when talking about more than 1 lego brick, yet another barely-on-topic flame war about the pluralisation of Lego is inevitable? It happens every single time there is a Lego related story.
Is it time to start modding people who still use "legos" when they know what the result will be as trolls?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
NT
At my university we build robots out of lego to test pathfinding software.
It's cheap, and it can house the motors/circuit boards and stick together under a bit of stress, its perfect.
Meccano is good, but it can take longer to assemble. That's more of use for robots that need to withstand a lot more stress, such as arms.
Engineers today, what do they know? Make it too simple and too cheap and the boss will think anybody can do it.
Pining for the fjords
The company name is RIM (Research in Motion) not RIMM (Research in M-Motion?)
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
It's even faster than just "Research In Motion"
I'm an old IT engineer who still remembers the days when there were no software failures, because the hardware wouldn't stay up long enough for you to find any.
In those days hard engineering was the rule, and when you wanted to prototype a small machine or provide a simple service like rotating an aerial, you used MECCANO.
Of course, those were analogue days, but the principle of using a construction toy for real work still applied!
Please do not generalize based on your limited anecdotal knowledge.
YOU grew up calling them "legos." That is because your parents, or the people who introduced you to the LEGO Play System (TM), were uneducated on the subject, or simply did not care. I grew up calling the toy by its proper name: LEGO
"Grammar Nazis" used to be called something different: Parents and schoolteachers. It is unfortunate that many of the finer points of the English language are falling by the wayside. Improper English grammar tends to make a writer seem incompetent and ignorant, sometimes even stupid. It is not without reason that bad grammar incenses some of us.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised one of the Mythbusters haven't used Lego robots in their test rigs. Maybe they're biased toward combat-capable machinery.
A stick up one's ass tends to make one sound pompous and obnoxious, sometimes even anal.
It is not without reason that pointless sillyness incenses others of us.
Where do I find a hacker to give my stack of LEGO Mindstorms so he can combine them with my Bluetooth Roombas for a home automation army that I can lead around town with my mobile phone?
I'm not kidding.
--
make install -not war
TFA and the /. summary seem to use RIM's stock ticker symbol here (http://finance.google.com/finance?q=RIMM)
According to Research in Motion's web site (www.rim.net), the correct acronym for the company name is RIM.
RIMM is the company's NASDAQ stock symbol.
CA super glues have highly variable quality and composition.
Methyl Ethyl Ketone is what we've used to make LEGO devices (including a waldo for our FIRST robotics controller) permanent.
It's nasty stuff we don't let the kids use tho. (for instance ABS Weld-On is 60% MEK)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I agree, I think we also need a "-1, Unfunny" for poor attempts at humor.
I bought some for my last job for surgical device prototyping. Sometimes to mock up mechanisms or as test stands. But a few times we made working devices. No, never used on humans. Lego's are fun, but not FDA approved.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
> It seems like a logical choice.
)
Absolutely. It's the first step towards flexible robots that can turn into any form that's practical:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Stargate
My brother built something like this LEGO panoramic camera mount using Mindstorms. His digital camera screw-mounts to it, and it turns a precise number of degrees and pushes the camera's shutter button, then turns again... A lot of other people have done similar things. I'm in the midst of building a LEGO-based robotic arm to grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder. LEGO is a great prototyping tool and with the addition of mindstorms you can build amazing things: the LEGO rubik's cube solver is pretty old, but the LEGO car assembly line is pretty spectacular. That's like $5000 of LEGO right there.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
BES still won't work with a native Exchange 2007 environment, but hey... they have more important things to do, like make lego robots!
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
Seems like there's a market for a modular rapid prototyping kit, that gets past a few of the Lego limitations.
You'd want it to be stronger - with modular connections that lock together rather than relying on friction joints at any point in the structure.
You'd want more flexibility of orientation - e.g. parts that can be connected at any planar-rotated angle with respect to each other, and then locked at that angle.
You might prefer to give up the ability to completely re-use parts, in exchange for being able to easily cut parts of the precise length needed, from longer stock - no need to fit your design to the limited lengths available, also reducing the number of fewer component types you need to keep on hand, and eliminating the problem of needing "just one more part".
What else?
I'd bet one big advantage of Lego is that it helps avoid any RF interference caused by metallic structures. That's a big deal if your goal is to test the strength/efficiency/pattern of the radiation. In fact that may have been what gave him the idea to begin with.
Back in the old days we used this to make Asteroids in our game..
Get some polystyrene, spray-paint it and stick it on a little lego twistee thing with a black background...
Take a photo with a webcam(*), do one turn of the steering wheel (which turns the asteroid 1/32 of a full circle), take another shot, and repeat 32 times..
Import into deluxe paint, and voila, one asteroid!
Woosh....
(*)(Of course, webcam's used to be called "Digitisers" back then)
I don't support imaginary property rights, so just why would I care that calling them legos makes the Lego trademark generic? It's a completely lost cause. If you have to correct everyone who isn't a Lego fanatic, you've already completely lost the case for the trademark being anything but generic.
The battle is over. I xerox things, I once played with legos, I wipe my nose with kleenex, and I google for information. They're words now, they have been for years and there's no going back, no matter how many annoying letters legal departments send out to protect trademarks that were generic long before I was even born.
They should be glad they've been so successful.