Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 think the hardest part of using lego for that kind of work is to have the beancounters accept the expense as work related. Usually, I had to use my own personnal stock when I needed to hold prototype boards together.
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.
He is a busy genius - I stumbled across his site when I was told someone mapped the tunnel network below the University of Waterloo. And he did.
IMHO, the coolest thing he ever built was converting a scanner into a digital camera. People, if you have a few free minutes, check his site out. Lots of cool stuff there!
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
That's like when NASA put in a request for a convertable GTO (sports car) to pull heavy lifting body designs (shuttle is a lifting body) and film them for research. Of course it was denied. They then put in a request for something like a "aerodynamic research tow vehicle with film platform" and it was approved. And thusly, the lifting body concept was proven and established.