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LEGO Announces GNU/LInux-Powered Mindstorms EV3 Platform
First time accepted submitter Barryke writes "Today LEGO announces the new mohawk (NASA's turf) sporting MINDSTORMS EV3 platform (press release). And with details on its features and innards (in Dutch) which in short comes down to: 'Its intelligent brick sports an ARM9-soc running Linux on 64MB RAM and 16MB storage memory, and supports SD cards. There are also four ports, which allow four other 'Bricks' can be connected. The intelligent brick can be reached by WiFi, USB and Bluetooth, and supports control via Android and iOS devices. It comes with 3 servo's, two touch sensors and an IR sensor to track other robots at upto six meters. It also includes 17 build plans, shown in 3D using Adobe Inventor Publisher.'"
mindstorms are too good for kids
From the two English articles, I see a Linux kernel. I don't see any evidence that the user space on top of it is GNU. More likely is BusyBox/Linux.
Man, I bet Autodesk will be pissed to learn that Adobe released a product with the same name as their Inventor Publisher.
I would have loved this when I was growing up, considering that programmable robots at that time were limited to industry and research labs at universities.
In any event, the asking price seems a bit too high for what LEGO are offering and with what's now available today; touching on just one facet, after a cursory glance on Mouser/DigiKey, PCB manufacturing companies, and 3D printing shops, the so-called intelligent brick, along with its circuitry innards, could easily be fabricated on a one-off basis for under $75-100 USD. For $350 USD, they should have at least thrown in a decent CMOS camera and more servos.
1. Do current Mindstorm devices (servos, sensors) work with it? Or am I going to have to buy all new ones?
2. On-brick programming is cute for toys and whatnot, but I had to build an entire communicative framework to do live remote programming control with my PC being the brains, sending and receiving signals over Bluetooth, basically running a processing stub on the brick, but the AI was live running on the PC.
I need to do that for real AI work, kthxbie.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I wonder whether they can brick their brick? Turn a lego into a brick? Get it? Ah forget it.
Porting to a new ARM SoC
--libman
Demonstrated last year as a matter of fact, so I guess this wasn't too far off.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
...coming in 3...2...1...
C|N>K
Although that's a good thing for people who already have stuff, because it means its compatible with NXT sensors and motors, at the same time I'm a bit disappointed because the NXT only has 7 I/O ports, and to control more devices you need another NXT brick.
What would be nice is if you control more than just the 7 devices that you can plug into the brick without having to add another programmable brick to the system... say, by separating things like device power supply from device control, and using a separate battery box (or boxes) to supply power to as many devices as you want, and the cpu simply addresses them in a not entirely dissimilar way to how many USB devices are addressed on a single bus.
Of course, this brick has USB connectivity, so it may at least possible to add this sort of functionality to this device.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
64MB RAM and 16MB storage ???
That can't be right...
Seriously... it makes no sense. When is storage capacity *smaller* than ram?
The article either has it backwards, or else they meant 16gb of storage.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Does this mean that I can finally retire my venerable WRT54G?
Kid-proof tablet..
https://www.quora.com/lego_tidbits/Lego-Mindstorms-EV3-More-Info
-PBR
I have a feeling that Legos are going to beat most of the private companies into space. They'll probably outdo them on satellite launches too.
Or maybe the question should. Be: why do Americans think Danes speak Dutch, when they infact speak Danish?
A quick search shows no info on which SoC is used under the hood. Are there any better googler than I up to the challenge?
i think they meant Autodesk Inventor Publisher, right?
We know Apple could sell the iPhone cheaper because Apple makes massive profits. Does Lego make massive profits? No, in fact before it re-invented itself, it was like Apple in serious trouble of going the way of Meccano. Which still exists but only as a perversion of its former self.
People often seem to think all there is to a product is its physical production. THAT is easy, although Lego is a bit more accurate in its production then most plastic factories, it can be easily replicated to produce a machine to produce simple bricks. BUT that is NOT Lego. Lego is ALL the models, which in box form have often to be in stores for a year or more before hopefully being sold, constantly having to keep up with trends like hot movies because the OLD business model of outdated non-current models wasn't working. And developing Mindstorms wouldn't have been cheap either.
Lego suffers from the high cost of mass production of an INSANE number of parts that all have to be combined, they can't just let one machine run indefinite pushing out one type of brick, it is lots of different pieces in lots of colors that all have to come together in production runs from which only tiny amounts are sent out and the rest has to be stored.
It is a logistacal nightmare and quite different from how other plastic producers like say plastic bottles work, most plastic bottles arrive at the bottling plant in granular form, one machine makes a test tube and another blows it up JUST before it is filled in an constant single item production run. THAT is cheap. Lego's method is not. In fact, lego's method of selling LOTS and LOTS of different models is EXACTLY what Apple is NOT doing. Even Samsung isn't. If Lego was a phone maker, there would be 2000 current models, ALL of them with instructions how alter them completely, combine them and turn them into complex robots.
That is why Lego is expensive. Look at their profits, there is no excessive fat there. You can make cheap clones of a few boxes of lego easily but the entire product range? No. Proof? NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT! Oh you can buy 1 or 2 lego like models from China but NOT the constantly updated catalog lego catalog. You PAY for that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For goodness sake, I wish whoever wrote that would learn written English. Also, it's "videos", "photos", and so on.
"Absorbing your worst..."
It sounds like a job for a raspberry pi. The problem is to get mit's Scratch to play with it. I've been thinking about a way to do this for a few weeks. I
I hope they truly address battery life. I understand that making motors turn and sensory input costs energy but boy the NXT 2.0 eats through a pack of batteries like a pothead with munchies. In the RC world there are lots of energy efficient battery types, and for the price I think Lego should have included a decent rechargeable battery pack (NiMh, if not LiPo).
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
1. post critical article about $product (make sure the article also contains rebuttals);
2. followup 2 weeks later with new $product announcement that proves previous criticism wrong;
3. profit!
Not necessarily carried out consciously by news aggregation sites such as this one, but possibly still orchestrated by $product's marketing dept.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
It's hard to link a product announcement from Lego with an unrelated article from NY Times two weeks earlier. The idea that Lego stores up product announcements and then releases them two weeks after some guy somewhere writes an article about them is pretty much ridiculous.
Linking to an article on a website that most people can't read is bad enough. That the article contains no more information than the various English sources is just plain stupid. Tweakers, apart from being drug addicts, is a advertisement outlet for big iron and the copyright industry.
maybe that ship has sailed
With WiFi and BlueTooth it's just a matter of time until our Lego SkyNet overlord is replicating itself to take over.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)