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Legos for Hackers
rde writes "Everyone's favourite free-subscription-needed paper, the New York Times has an interesting piece on Lego's appeal to programmers and inventors, amongst others. " I still have all of mine from childhood. I could construct an industrial park out of all of them.
There's no mistaking that hackers love LEGOs. I'll focus on the programming-type hacker here, but I think it applies to anyone in pursuit of knowledge about particular systems. So, what parallels exist?
:: being the new ones). However, both systems, despite their limited set of rules and constructs, allow for great amounts of creativity.
Well, for one thing, LEGOs are a system with a bunch of rules. Just like programming languages - you can only connect blocks in a limited number of ways. In fact, there are (if I remember correctly), no more than 10 (probably fewer) types of inter-connections that can be made. ANSI C only has 27 keywords (C++ has 29 - class and
LEGO becomes an easy and very fun way to see what can be done within a very limited scope. And speaking of limited scope, I remember trying to make stuff with as few blocks as possible - if for nothing but to save the stress on my fingers breaking the thing apart afterward.
Also, LEGO is another way for people to learn modularity at a very early stage in life. I liked the fact that I could rip off the wing or the leg of something I built and just stick it on the next thing. Also, "upgrading" my stuff was a lot more fun - I just ripped off what I didn't need and replaced it.
But now I program. Is it more fun? Sometimes... but I definitely think building with LEGO would be much more fun as a full time job... And, it fits the description of programming, doesn't it? We should all become LEGO developers...
- Shaheen
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
As for X10 + lego, it wouldn't be hard to do at all: use one of the utils you can find at the links above + your linux x10 tools, and you're all set.
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Second, remember that you're not alone.
And finally, the Mindstorms robotics sets are labelled "12 yrs and up".
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And of course, these days, LegOS is something else.
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Seriously, it's very cool -- almost everyone involved in the reverse engineering project is here, plus a bunch of cool Media Lab folks, plus all sorts of wonderfully creative people from all over the world. Plus actual official lego people -- hopefully they'll hear some of what we're saying.
And of course, there's NELUG.
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Think about it... Capsela embraces many of the concepts of OOP:
There is a nice paper "Optomechanics with LEGO"
in Applied-Optics Vol. 37, p. 3408-16, 1998
The even did some interferometry experiments!
I prefered "Fischer-Technik" when I was a chield
and I also used it in the lab for some quick & dirty setups.
Doesn't anyone ever read slashdot anymore, or is everyone here just to try to be heard...
l/p: cipherpunk
has been for quite some time and is always mentioned here. I think the usual first post kiddies need to post this on any nyt articles...
clif
I remember having fun with my Legos as a child, but they weren't nearly as fun as Construx.
With Construx, you could build things faster, and the end result was much sturdier then what you got with legos. You could actually play with it (which wasn't nearly as fun as building it). Legos always have the weakness in that all the pieces attach in the same direction, and makes the end result quite fragile (at least on the edges). It was possible to build things with Construx that could survive a trip down the stairs, w/o falling apart!
I recall making an R2D2 out of them, with motor and all. Those were the days.
It seems everyone else was playing with Legos when they were a kid, but I was young I was playing with Fichertechnik.
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This was a great system of parts, that let you do a lot more than Legos at the time - they had various motorized kits, and a LOT of differnet parts like different angled connectors and very clever chains that you could build out of snap together links to make any length you desired.
It was also a lot sturdier that Legos. While Lego constructions tend to shed peices frequently, you could take something you built with Fichertechnik and roll it down the stairs if you liked (I did many times) without harm.
The only downsides were that they didn't tend to look as "finished" as Lego constructions do, and the parts were always a bit more expesnive (they originate in Germany). Some would say they were also harder to assemble, but I would dispute that based on my very limited experience with balky Lego parts sticking together or not sticking together, depending on which was the most annoying for you at the time.
They also had a robotics kit developed a long time ago, which they appear to have advanced since last I looked at it - but sadly it is still way more expensive than the Mindstorms kit, which means I'll probably have to go for a Mindstorms kit now. Still, it would be cool to be able to integrate pneumatic parts into a robot or use the solar power assembly to send a robot off on it's own forever armed only with the code you provided it
Check out thier website, especially the programming part - I found the name of thier programming langauge quite humorous. You haven't programmed at all until you've programmed in Lucky Logic!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As long as we're grousing about lego shortcomings, how about durability?
I run a web site using some lego motors and the things aren't good for more than a million reversals under moderate load before their bearings seize up.
Thank goodness MIT published hints on how to retrofit regular cheap motors for the mind numbingly expensive Lego brand motors. (Expand shaft with layers of heat shrink rubber tubing until you can cram an 8 point gear or worm screw onto it. Probably a worm screw if you have a high RPM low torque motor.)
The moral of this post is really that you shouldn't underestimate the power of the lego philosophy; in computer science, one turing-complete language can do just as much as any other turing-complete language (with different levels of human pain!). I suspect that there's a vague analogue to legos - with the right subset of actuators, sensors, and infrastructure pieces, you can build just about anything with legos.
Drooling to go play with some legos,
-Dave
if lego lowered the cost of legos their sales would go up dramatically. 'nuff said.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
I don't mean to insult Construx,
I had some when I was little, and played with
them alot. They were great for building large
structures. But the reason I don't have any
anymore (and the main thing I didn't like about
them) was that the connectors had a structural
flaw in the plastic such that they would split
down the center when put under structural stress.
So, all my Construx broke by the time I was 9.
Course, I was building things like catapults,
ones that were able to fling small bricks, etc.
( I had a LOT of Construx ). Anyone else notice
that flaw, or was it just me?
BTW, Lego blocks integrate better into a structure
built with Capsela than with Construx, IMHO.
I've been a lego freak since I was 10. I was playing with them sooner than that, but around 10-11 I was building more and more elaborate projects out of boredom. The first was a guitar with a whammy bar(only whammied one string) using rubber bands for strings. Even hooked up a small earpiece, using it as a microphone and it sounded(faintly) like a real accoustic guitar. Then a few yeras later I pioneered a 3 speed transmission out of it, and have been doing more bizarre projects ever since. Some bits of it is on my website.
If anything, kids that choose to play with legos do so because they're inclined to be creative. Can we please end the brain-donor suggestions of 'legos should be part of the curiculum' crap, how would you like it if some busybodies took away your lego time because you HAVE to play little league.
Bad analogy of the year:
But this notion of Lego technology is not just metaphorical. What is being learned in classic Lego construction is a kind of digital language. The use of block accumulations to create illusions of smoothness is not unlike the way discrete numbers become waves of sound in the playing of a CD.
Oh man, what a stretch. The guy who wrote this is the same kind of guy that gets his computer theories from GUIs in Hackers, Net, and ideas from way-out-there SF. The rest of the article is such a pedant mess its not worth reading. Would it kill the media to admit two things:
1. A majority of "computer people" are creative people. Because they're not pounding out power-chords or painting murals no one has seemed to make the connection.
2. Programming/Engineering etc. are creative professions that require lots of technical and analytic skills. The same way Jimi Hendrix would be a terrible guitar player if he didn't have an extended knowledge of music thoery.
Knowing this, it isn't such a surprise that IT types were lego kids. Then the NY Times can spare us their 'lego binary language' theories.
Well, I better get back to building my 'lego miniprogram' with my 'legolanguage compiler!' The 90's indeed!
Maybe for you Legos were great fun, but not every kid wants to spend 42+ hours building the 'Mega-Castle-Fortress-set-including-the-black-kni
creative hobbies while other kids do other things.
Forcing children to do something you approve of doesn't make them love it. If we listened to every faddish crackpot who knows what good for kids we'd have a curriculum that includes pyramid power, creationism, theraputic touch, etc.
I believe that legos help develope the creativity that is later applied to the engineering field rathar than just appealing to children predisposed to these places in our society. I mean, what creative kid do you know hasn't loved legos... lol. I personally believe they should be an integrated part of the school curriculum... maybe inspire creativity in school for once rather than crush our childrens' imaginations. Oh well, back to the play pen.
--Ks9
I hadn't seem what angio said yet when I posted the above (apologies).
Here's the fake username/pass I just set up:
name: login_hater
pass: login_hater
Let me know if these work and enjoy the lego article!
Btw, I'd suggest against a username/pass like slashdot/slashdotted/etc. since these tie all of us back to here.