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Lego Allowing Open-Source OS
JAZ writes "Forbes has an article on
on Lego Mindstorms and the independent Open Source (MPL) LegOS and how Lego is not trying to stop it (obviously Lego is NOT an American Corp=]) It seems that sharing Intellectual Property can actually help sales... who'da thunk it "
Well, considering their stance with regard to Open source, they are indeed stupid.
While everybody was screaming when netscape made Mozilla oss most Americans forget that Linux and friends were popular long before that in Europe, particularly Scandinavia and the German speaking area. Siemens, SAG, Ericson etc. have embraced oss much earlier.
the Linux 'breakthrough' that happened in late 98 in the US took place about a year earlier in Germany, with all major software companies jumping on the train. No wonder Linux is the No 1 unix in Germany...
So can we program these things in Lisp?
Maybe an Erector Set would be a more appropriate case...er...medium. (Do they still make erector sets?) Plenty of places to screw stuff down and I seem to remember some kind of paneling for walls. It could be pretty cool.
- G. B. Smith
There is no off postion on the genius switch. - David Letterman
This ignores that most of the video game manufacturers collect royalties off of game sales. I've heard that the Playstation is actually sold at cost or slightly below to keep the market for games high.
A couple of thoughts on this:
1) I've been pretty active with LegOS for quite some time. It is not new; rather, it is nearly a year old and has been under active development for most of this time. There already are several developers- not more than 3 or 4, really, but enough to keep this type of project going.
Kekoa has done almost all of the grunt work on the HW end, and from that Markus and a couple of others took care of basically all of the code. From there, it has basically already taken on a life of it's own- there is a cross-platform emulator helpful for code debugging, substantial documentation (to toot my own horn) and it is being used in other projects (as the base for a networking project and a projected JVM.)
2) It will never be like Mozilla, not just because the people working on it are not employed by LegOS, but because the complete system is ~10K lines of code. That means that slackers like me can actually read, understand, and even once in a blue moon fix the code- unlike Mozilla, which, while a great project, has a ridiculous learning curve.
-luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Linux started to spread throughout German
universities by about 1993/94, especially
in Computer Science. The major breakthrough
for Linux in "the" industry, a couple of years
later, most likely is based on the fact that
Linux'er from 93/94 have already left their
universities, going to work somewhere else and
bringing Linux along with'em.
That's exactly how it working in my company.
Although we are in computer business, noone
has even heard of Linux before I joined them
around '97 and now nearly every branch is
running at least one Linux server, like ftp
and/or www.
On the other hand, it might be also argued that the LEGO Group Companies could, say, go fuck themselves.
Jesus, I simply *cannot* picture someone saying "LEGO Bricks or Toys" instead of "legos" in normal conversation. There is nothing I hate more than blood-sucking lawyers trying to regulate the way we speak.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Everytime I go to a toy shop I look at Lego with a huge feel of nostalgia. It is a great toy system. However one must grow up and look for other "toys" in his life. Childhood was something left in a foggy past. Farewell Lego you have helped me grow up...
But now this LegOS is changing my mind... Suddenly I started thinking that in my age I could make some interesting toys out of Lego. This idea would never come to my mind without such system. At least in a prototype level this combination of Lego + LegOS could give some interesting food of discovery and exploration. The combination is perfect for making perliminary small and cheap experiments. Maybe I would even risk to make some weird practical stuff out of it.
Well strange as it seems, but I'm reckoning of that feeling of willing to run over the nearest toy shop...
Hope that Lego understands what it has nearby. They can't do such thing no matter how they look at it. Their minds are mainly locked on kids. LegOS is a door that no Lego manager would ever imagine to open. It opens Lego into a new world between toys and serious stuff. In a good development rythm LegOS may give a chance for many people to "play" robotics and start feeding a new world in electronics.
I remember seeing somewhere in the past that Lego bricks are manufactured very uniformly to highly accurate specs. Some Italian scientist had discovered that they are excellent for building quite accurate scientific instruments (in this case I think they were optical devices). Apparently much cheaper than and just as accurate than what they had to manufacture specifically for the instruments prior to the discovery.
Actually this kind of sueing makes a lot of sense. A company can effectively lose a trademark if it becomes "common vocabulary" that in normal speech has a general meaning.
You can maintain trademark without suing, just make a contractual agreement with the other people using the name, specifying how they need to identify the trademark, that they need to identify themselves as clearly not part of the Lego corporation, etc. More companies need to think about doing this rather than throwing lawyers at people, since it can potentially help profits to do so.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You can buy parts packs from Lego Shop @ home, 1-800-453-4653, including packs of bricks, plates, slopes, baseplates, windows, doors, hinges, connecters, wheels. They should be able to send you a catalog.
Failing that, the freestyle sets have lots of basic sets.
George
..and the RCX would have been the size of VCR. :-) Imagine the size of the motors and the batteries you would need. Not too mention the amount of bricks just to build something half useful. The Mindstorms kit would come with buckets and buckets of bricks too.
I saved my metal erector-set for my son, he is 6 now and isn't very interested. They have a plactic "equivalent" called K'nex that he is really into. He builds some neat stuff, and the parts are a lot lighter and flexible than the old metal kits. It goes together a lot faster than the metal nuts and bolts. He can put together a huge crane in an afternoon where I would have taken the better part of a week to make the same size thing if I had even had enough parts back then.
:-) ) still love playing with them together.
I too was kind of resistant to the 'tinker toys' sets that are made of plastic. But I have to admit, my kids do a lot of neat stuff with them that we could never have done with the wood ones (the bendable plastic rods open up a whole new dimension.
The only thing I don't really care for is the proliferation of the Lego theme-kits (although I love the star wars stuff). The effect this seems to have is that the kids want the next set so they can make whatever the kit is designed for (space vehicles, pirate sips, subs)instead of using generic parts they already have and using their imagination to make something original.
Then the parts get all mixed together and they get real frustrated when they pull out the plans and try to rebuild a specific kit. But, still a cool toy and my kids (and I
Good Idea. BTW, yup, they still make them, and i believe you can buy erector "power tools"! I have an idea! i'll build a basic case out of an erector set, and then glue some styrofoam to the outside and i'll have a NG Amiga!
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Realistically, it's their term - it's even a registered trademark! - so they can legally say how they'd like people to use it. In fact, they have to. Otherwise they risk losing the registered trademark :-).
Wade...
Better yet, how about a hybrid case? Erector would make a great internal frame and place to mount hardware and Lego would make a great shell for it. I was wondering how I would build the internal mounts for drives and etc, Erector sets would be a great answer. Like Lego, they allow for future expansion...
Using the argument that this is a wonderful educational tool for my daughter, I think I've convinced my wife that we should purchase a set. Or she's just pretending to believe me because she knows how much I love gadgets. :)
When I am too old to play with LEGO, just put me in a box and bury me, I'm dead.
-- Will program for bandwidth
emulators run roms downloaded off websites... if someone has an emulator and no playstation, they're not likely to go out to the store, buy the game, throw it in a drawer somewhere, and only *then* feel okay about downloading the game off the web. they're just going to download the game. no money there.
Not Linux, but at least *nix.
There was a demonstration of a Java/Mindstorms combination at JavaOne. More information (including a link to the webcast and where to look in the webcast) can be found in this lugnet robotics message.
This is exactly why manufacturers of sound and video cards should release the source to their drivers. It only makes sense that more people will buy their cards if they can actually USE them on the machine of their choice.
The *only* one that seems to benefit from WinModems, for example, is M$...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This place has it all - including parts that are damn near impossible to find retail! You can buy individual parts - not just whole kits (anybody need a bag of 1x1s?), so you can get those pieces you really need...
Even has online ordering - cheap prices too (for Lego)!
Pitsco-Lego/Dacta
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There has been some discussion on the lugnet robotics forums about this. IIRC, they are targeting it for Xmas release. However, as I understand it, Lego is also planning on releasing RCX 1.5 for the holidays, so I'd imagine that O'Reilly might delay their book so as not to be immediately obsoleted.
-luge
IAAL,BIANLY
How about legi? sorta like lagi (rabbits). Latinesque!
---
END OF LINE
I know where you can buy a fishbowl case. Just go down to your local home electronics warehouse store, eg. Future Shop, walk over to the computer section, and grab an iMac. Most people don't realise it, but the stuff you can see through the case is actually printed on laminated cardboard. Behind the "artwork" is a goldfish swimming around with big electrodes attached to it. It's a special CRT, too. Everything behind the face isn't actually in the case, but is in an extra-dimensional space, which the electrons fly out of and hit the phosphors. That way, the fish can't electrocute itself.
Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:
/. by Russ Nelson. :) Also very useful for debugging.
1) The Lego uses a Hitachi H8-300 chip, which is a target for gcc, so compiling code for the chip is merely a matter of rebuilding gcc as a cross-compiler.
2) Strictly speaking, LegOS is not an OS but a library, which you compile along with your actual code to give you OS-like features: threading, time management, etc. It also frees you from lego's arbitrary limit on variables (only 32! with no data structures! eww...) and other such problems.
Umm... that's all the geek info I can think of off the top of my head. URLs:
The Official LegOS homepage.
LUGNET, which is a discussion area for all types of lego stuff. the robotics list there serves as the main discussion area for LegOS development and use.
The Internals page. Already mentioned here on
EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself
My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.
Good luck- help Lego back into the black-
luge
IAAL,BIANLY
What about /dev/lego1 or /proc/lego? :-) I guess most people don't access their Lego Mindstorm droids from their Linux servers..?
--
Have you looked at their web site? It's very interesting.
Wade.
If O'Reilly writes a Lego book, what animal will they use for the cover? Maybe the dragon from one of the Lego fantasy sets? I'd love to read the colophon from the back of the book...
"The animal on the cover is a small plastic dragon (Draco draco var. injectus moldii). Habitat includes the area under sofas and sock piles."
At least they recognize the fact that an open-source project might actually /make/ them money, unlike some /Japanese/ firms who won't let emulators out there hit the market.
It seems that the Japanese firm in question recognizes the fact that an emulator will NOT make them money. An emulator lets you use hardware you already own to perform the function of the hardware the manufacturer would like to sell to you. Therefore you don't need to buy the hardware and the company doesn't make any money. Yeah, I know, all the people using the emulators are buying the games.
Lego clearly benefits from an Open Source development environment. Nintendo clearly loses with widely available emulators. Open Source is not the answer to every question.
Cool... Didn;t think about that.. I'll start on it the week. I should have enough. Hmmm... Where are my lego's?
If i finsh it i'll post it some where
MarNuke
Who says it's about time we got a lego icon for stories?
eh he got this already. Top of my monitor is a lego sculpture "Jar Jar Binks has a bad day" He's hanging over my monitor by a vine. All the other figures have swords or pikes. Jar Jar has a lego plant.
Actually this kind of sueing makes a lot of sense. A company can effectively lose a trademark if it becomes "common vocabulary" that in normal speech has a general meaning. I don't know if PC ever was an IBM trademark, but they sure can't sue anybody over it any more even if were...
Well, don't tell just us, tell Lego too! Then they might release the specs right away when they create their next Cool Thing.
hmm. i have in my hand a single piece of legum. on the floor is a pile of legae.
i enjoy going to my local legatorium, to buy new items of legata.
i like to legate on a regular basis.
Correct Lego is a Danish company...
:-)
....and just for the people who don't know where that is, I'll just say that it is NOT Sweden
Allthough both coutries is Scandinavian countries.
Screw what the Lego corp. thinks. They're a big, nasty, sue-your-ass-off corporation. They've shut down people before. Example, a few years back some guy made "Lego Wars", a nifty miniatures ruleset for gaming with your legos. He got shut down quick as soon as the Lego corp. found out about it.
Now this is cool. I still remember playing with Lego on my old Apple IIc.
Good luck to the hackers working on this!
Why doesn't anyone make a case for PC's out of LegoS? I've seen the MAc ones before...
Your mammas flamebait.
Man, why didn't they have these when I was a kid?!
I've built one. Unfortunately I didn't have enough to make it cool looking, or even solid... It did work alright though.
:) :)
But talk about expandable!
It'd be neat to operate a company that does specialty cases. ie: hardwood, lego, nerf, fishbowl (fish that like hot water I guess), marble (heavy!), etc... It'd be really fun.
And why does everyone say legos? grrr.. That has to be the most annoying word. I've always thought (and continue to think) that you can't pluralize lego. "What's that in the box?" "Oh, it's lego."... y'know? Maybe I should ask Lego what they think about ppl pluralizing lego.
ok... I'm done venting.
I just got myself a Mindstorms kit last week. There is no way in smurf I would have bought it had LegOS not been available. I own a Mac, and the silly software that comes with it won't run, not to mention how unprogrammable it is. Give me C++ over some graphical programming any day.
To Lego: You got a $200 sale to me precisely because you have allowed this to happen.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Eureka! The solution to NASA's budget problems:
Use Legos to build the International Space Station! It doesn't get more modular than Legos.
And even better, you're much less likely to step on one of the suckers in zero G.
Programmable lego is cool. X10 home automation is cool. Combine the two... wow.
It will be interesting to see if several developers actually jump into the project and make a successful open source story.
:)
Or if it ends up like netscape where not many developers really jumped in to help out.
I think most OpenSource programmers really don't want to give their time to propel the profits of a company, but usually we dont get to play with their toys.
http://developers.forchrist.com
AFAIK, LEGO is Danish.
The info was already on the web,
and any damages the people
responsible could have paid would
be insignificant to Lego. They had
nothing more to lose by 'allowing' the
info to stay up, only extra customers to
gain.
In constrast a few years ago it became
popular to call a certain way of displaying
data about high energy particle decays
a 'lego' plot because of it's
lego-block like appearance. Lego
actually took legal action over this
(presumably to protect the brand name).
lego has absoloutely nothing to lose by the OSS lego thing, since they don't sell software, they sell physical hardware. Even if someone has open-source lego software which lego got no money for, they still have to pay lego money for, well, legos.
Since the software is useless without the hardware (which is what costs money anwyay), why would Lego care that the software is freely available? They aren't losing anything.
It's kind of like the whole Palmpilot emulator thing. Palm doesn't try to stop emulation-- in fact they _help_ the emulators, supplying roms and stuff-- because without the hardware the software has no use.
So don't assume lego is some benevolent company helping open source. If they were somehow losing money, they'd be fighting as dirty as Nintendo is.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Lego Mindstorms Reverse-Engineering. Go. Download. Be happy.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Lego isn't making money off the Mindstorms programming language and interface. They'll selling the hardware (and just packaging everything necessary to access that hardware along with it). It's not as if Lego separates the two. An open-source Lego OS isn't going to hurt them at all. People will still need to buy Mindstorms to be able to use it. At least they recognize the fact that an open-source project might actually /make/ them money, unlike some /Japanese/ firms who won't let emulators out there hit the market.
"A piece of Lego"
"I have a lot of Lego"
"I have built a robot out of Lego"
One could argue that I'm only saying this because I'm British (Where the plural of 'A Lego brick' is always* 'Lego'), but I do actaully have some justification - from the rec.toys.lego FAQ:
I see it as much like sand - you'd say
"A grain of sand" vs "A sand"
"I have a lot of sand" vs "I have a lot of sands"
"I have built a castle out of sand" vs "I have built a castle out of sands"
Pedantic, I know - but it just always sounds so wrong when people refer to them as "Legos"...
cheers,
Tim
They've also got some Star Wars expansion stuff not mentioned in the article. Imagine a relatively intelligent R2 unit wandering around... Hmm, I need to look more at the specs for this thing: voice synthesization would be cool. Mouse droids, here I come...
This is a definite must-have for any hardware-tinkering geek.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
I don't know all the technical details about LegOS, but wouldn't it be cool
if you could get the MindStorms protocalls to work in HyoerCard?
The thing still kicks ass, and it would be super-easy to use.
Then again, some people might not like it...
Ah well...
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
That's pretty funny, do you know who they sued?
:-)
Paw (Physics Analysis Workstation, a plotting/data analysis program) from CERN, still uses "LEGO" as an option to plotting commands
Man do Lego kick butts!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Heh-heh-heh, you figured that one out too.
I'm glad my daughter is old enough to play with real Lego, the Duplo just doesn't cut it.
George
The basic approach in the book is to go beyond what's in the box--software from the Internet, new building projects, and that sort of thing.
The book includes these topics:
Coverage of alternate development environments, like legOS, the wildly popular NQC, pbFORTH, and (ahem) Visual Basic.
Robot projects, including building instructions and working code.
Mechanical design and tricks.
Do-it-yourself sensors.
A tag game for two robots.
A light treatment of subsumption architecture, with implementations in NQC and legOS.
Other fun stuff.
I don't want to ruin the surprise about the animal on the cover. I'll just say that it's very appropriate.
rats... I was just looking for my latin grammar to write a comment like that one =)
roflmao
Yes, but how old does she have to be to handle an errector set? I was nearly done with high school by the time I had one.
And why aren't they interested in lego? THough one loves those horrid new-fangled, over-sized, plastic tinker toys . . .
I have a devil of a time finding the plain, simple, stuff that is the base of a solid lego collection. Of the three cubic feet or so of lego from my childhood (still with my parents), the majority is plain, simple, blocks.
The basic "build what you want" sets (remember the semi-opaque plastic trays?) seem to be long gone, as well as the sets of specialty parts (axles, bevelled roof pieces, etc.). When the pieces exist, they're part of a larger set to build something specific. For that matter, almost everything available now is a set to build somehting specific, with specialized pieces. And where are the blue train tracks?
So far, I'm having better luck with Megablocks (?)--and my daughters seem to prefer their pastel colors, too.
Never mind the fancy doo-dads. Sell me about 20 lbs of 2x4 blocks, 2 lbs of 4x4, and about 5 lbs of miscellaneous other blocks. THen I'll be happy to add the odds & ends.
It sounds like LEGO will be releasing a driver development kit that is more helpful to people working in alternate languages etc. From the FAQ:
Will LEGO MINDSTORMS release a Software Developer's Kit?
We have released a Software Developer's Kit (SDK), which includes a license to utilize the underlying
technology for the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 1.0. The SDK has documentation to enable
advanced users to write commands to the RCX from alternative programming environments, such as Visual Basic.
This documentation provides much greater access to the full range of commands and functions built inside the
RCX.
The first release of the SDK focuses on communicating with the RCX from Windows applications, as the current
drivers are designed for this environment.
Steps are being taken now to revise the architecture of the drivers to be much more platform independent.
This will give users more options for leveraging the power of the RCX. Once the new drivers have been
developed and tested, we will release a revised and more powerful SDK. We expect the second SDK to be
released in 1999.
Use of the SDK and the underlying technology is strictly under the terms of the SDK licensing agreement and
is only for noncommercial use. The LEGO Group retains all rights to the product and the underlying
technology.
I know this is getting a little off-topic, but according to the Lego Group, the correct term is just lego, not legos. Now, I just have to get some of those programmable legos. Err, lego.
I don't think everyone is so happy because Lego is being benevolent, it's just great to see a company that is acting intelligently. It probably wouldn't have suprised many people if they decided to fiercely and paranoidly (is that a word?) hold onto their IP.
No company would go open source if it was going to hurt them, it would be stupid. But lot's of companies don't realize that OSS can actually help them, so it's nice to see one that does.
-dl
> Maybe I should ask Lego what they think about ppl pluralizing lego.
/. readers have similar-sized collections? Probably lots.)
They disapprove - the company prefers the terms "Lego bricks" or "Lego blocks" or even "Lego toys."
How do I know? Well, I'm half-Danish (born in Aeroskobing, Aero - I forget the &-tags for the special characters) so I've had them around me literally all my life. In my closet are enough bricks to fill two large moving boxes, some of which date back to the 60's when Samsonite held a license to manufacture them. (Then again, how many
If only we got to see half the cool stuff they make for the European market, like the extensive trainsets...sigh. Still, I'd love to have a tower case made out of Lego bricks. Not only expandable, but thoroughly customizable: suffering from iMac envy? Go grab a bucket from Toys-R-Us and change colors!
Hmmmmm....perhaps a Lego tux? Shouldn't be too hard.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Man, why didn't they have these when I was a kid?!
Yeah.. wish they had. I remember the coolest thing about Legos (when I still played with them/had some) was the lego kits where you could make things like cars and helicoptors and connect a little motor to them to make them work...
Insert mind here.
FYI, I read a posting in Usenet a while ago by someone from O'Reilly & Associates who was in the process of writing an O'reilly Lego Mindstorms book. That should be interesting. I assume that O'reilly would cover something like alternative OS use in the book.
-Ken
I don't know, but they're much harder to build with than Legoses.
I lived my first 9 years in the Netherlands, and my parents were kind enough to give me Lego on every birthday.
Lego can't afford to alienate any potential customers. They've been experiencing financial distress for the first time in decades lately, citing competition from cheap chinese knockoffs that look like and are compatible with genuine Lego, but are not nearly as durable.
They are looking at the possibility of making their very first round of layoffs, or already have by this point. The last thing they need is to tell a fanatical customer to take a hike.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Anybody got 200 bucks to spare?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Doesn't Lego look funny if you read it too many times in a row? Lego blah Lego Lego Lego Lego Mindstorms brand Lego Linux Lego Lego Lego Legos (Ha)
Wah!
The original programming "system" LEGO came up with for the RCX isn't bad - it almost allows one to create a subsumption-based achitecture "program", instead of a top-down procedural one, possibly opening up the ability to create a system more like what Rodney Brooks (sp?) has done.
Not that I think LegOS or NQC are bad things or too hard. I like the control that they give (much more so than LEGO's stuff), but I wonder what if what the Mindstorms system comes with has been investigated in depth? I think maybe one of the problems/issues that it is more difficult to see what it can do is the fact that for certain experiments, you need more than one RCX unit...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon