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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.'"
And all of the software that comes with it would take you a significant amount of money on a "one-off basis." Also, you're getting servos, sensors, instructions, and other parts. For $350, that's pretty fucking good.
Why do people always say, "I could build it myself far cheaper?" This is fucking obvious - you can build it with cheaper parts all on your own, assuming the value of your time is (or approaches) zero for the effort of building and coding everything to work properly. together. It's PHB syndrome - I haven't really considered what I'm getting in the box, I'm just shouting about how expensive it is, because it's not as cheap as the 100-brick lego sets I used to have as a kid.
If you can do it cheaper, then you should open a business and compete with Lego - these are popular kits, and they make good money off them. If, however, you can't... then maybe you should stop crying about the price.