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Linux-Powered Lego-Like Devices Target Developers
An anonymous reader writes "A six-person startup is readying a product resembling nothing so much as a set of electronic Legos for device designers. The idea is to provide a set of snap-together components from which engineers can build 'anything,' the company claims, without having to learn solid state electronics. Both hardware and software (Linux/Java phoneME/OSGi) are open source, so that over time, the Lego box will grow, the company hopes. Initially, there's an ARM11-powered base with built-in wifi, and modules for camera, GPS, motion detector, LCD display, keyboard, touchscreen, and stereo speakers. Ooh, and a mysterious 'teleporter,' too."
Is this like and adult open source version of lego mindstorm? I remember loving that as a kid, never really figured out how to make it do anything, though....
Actually, this is ideal for prototyping.
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And I suppose you wired your house yourself, then? You would never use an ethernet card without first fully understanding all its circuitry? And you programmed all your apps yourself, in assembly?
There's nothing wrong with using high-level programming languages, software libraries, and pre-built hardware. Using these pre-built components to build a useful device is no different than combining servers, routers, and wiring to build a network. You do *not* have to be intimately familiar with the low-level details of all the hardware in order to combine it together in a useful way.
These hardware modules looks like they could be very fun and very useful. A great way for a DIY person to put together a fun toy, or an inexpensive solution to a problem, etc. It could also be quite useful for people who want to prototype new device ideas without commissioning expensive custom components.
No one is arguing that the existence of these modular devices will replace the need for dedicated hardware for many applications (and the associated specialized engineers who design that hardware). The idea instead would be to lower the barrier to creating novel devices, so that hobbyists and non-specialists can try out new ideas that would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.
I know many people bemoan this "Cult of the Amateur" (e.g. Wikipedia, blogs, citizen journalism, high-level programming languages, etc.); but to me the whole "point" of technology in general (and computers in particular) is to reduce the barriers, so that "ordinary people" can do things that previously only a "selected few" were allowed to do. I find that this push towards community-driven work and lower barriers to technological progress and education are very much good things.
Speaking from personal experience, this sort of building-block approach to electronics can let a person down. I've designed a bunch of electronics, small simple chunks that do things like translate a logic-level signal to a relay that can switch ovens or computer-controlled A/D converters. By themselves, they work, but when you start just stacking them together like black boxes, their cumulative errors start to bite you -- or you put in a black box that contains a switching regulator and the line noise on the output wipes out everything downstream. If you don't know what they're actually doing, you don't know what their side-effects are going to be. The amount of post-regulator processing required to make a switching regulator look like a good, pure voltage source would be bulky enough to make that black box significantly less useful, and all that processing might not be required for 95% of possible loads.
Likewise, my coworkers do analog design of IC's, and even though we have a design reuse library for the company, every design they do is basically ab initio because another similar design does something they don't need and as a result uses up vital silicon space, and they can't simply remove just that bit.
A talented designer could use building blocks to build something great. A lousy designer could use those same blocks to build something dangerously unsafe -- they facilitate only design, not quality. Speaking as a lousy designer, I think it's a much better idea to actually do the work in analyzing the problem and coming up with an adequate design, and the good designers, in my experience, already *have* a head full of black boxes, for which they understand the limitations and how they interact.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If you're trying to produce an artificial intelligence to run the robot then the low level electronics aren't terribly important to you.
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Don't worry. The best selling digital multimeters in many labs are from a company called "Fluke" (German I think).
No, it will make 'buliding' stuff available to a larger audience.
The engineers will still have to learn C, BSIM and low pass filters. The market might insist on hiring cheaper, non-engineers in the positions formerly occupied by engineers, but engineers will still be engineers as long as there is a demand for them.
How does this differ from LabVIEW / G programming ?
No need to learn electronics, let other people do it for you. Just snap together the components.
I look dread the new crop of programmers and 'engineers' being 'output' by the educational system.
Yeah...
I suppose you layered the LCD screen on your laptop yourself, cast the engine block on your car yourself out of aluminum and oil-sand, burned a DVD with a pencil laser by hand, and fabricated the CPU of your computer with a blow torch on the beach?
Come off your high horse, man. As technology progresses, and gets more complex, the complexity of it is buried in abstracted "boxes" with vastly simplified interfaces that make it easier to use. You don't work out the details of range detection for interpersonal radio communication, you pick up your cell phone and dial a telephone number. If you are a programmer, you *might* write to registers, and you *might* understand memory offsets, but it's unlikely that you actually bother computing an offset with any regularity. And neither is particularly beneficial to getting the job done except in very rare cases.
There's evidence that that's how your mind works - intelligence involves the development of abstract ideas in order to make the cost of computation cheaper. By the time you are conscious of what you are seeing, most of the detail in what you actually see has been stripped out and replaced with vastly simpler, less detailed, abstract ideas.
You don't see the details of a house as you drive by, you see the abstract idea of "house". The lower layers of your brain have stripped away all the minutiae and replaced the image of the house with the idea of house. It's so effective that even as you are looking at it, if somebody asked you what color the house was, you'd have to take a brief moment to figure it out, first.
It's not shameful, it's an ordinary part of legitimate progress!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sure, what kid hasn't read the little brochure in their packet of Legos that explains that you don't call them Legos, but you call them Lego Bricks? For a while I thought it was pretty leet, like it was a cool "in" phrase. Now I just realize that they're doing what they gotta do to defend their trademark, which is "necessary" for them to lose protection in the face of cultural dilution. You know what, though? I ain't their bitch. I call 'em Legos. Yeah, too bad. Seeing as how everyone in America says Legos and applies the concept to everything (including TFA), I'd have to say they already lost this battle. I'm not going to go out of my way to explain their recommended legal terminology. Put another way, I'm going to speak English and not Corporate.
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