There are tons and tons of European soccer lego-based bots. I can't find any links off of the top of my head, but my favorite one had an entire assembly of arms and motors to drive them. The purpose? To do a victory dance. None other. Crazy Europeans, heh?:) ~luge
They are still keeping the internals "secret," in the sense that if you ask The Lego Group for documentation on opcodes, hardware, etc., you'll get nothing from them. However, Kekoa Proudfoot tortured his RCX until it talked, which gave the community the data it needed for the various open OS's now available. The page detailing his work is here. Once that work was done, the information was available, and the OS's were done. However, even then TLG nearly sued to keep the OS's off the web, according to Forbes. They did stop short of that, but still aren't at all cooperating. Poor business decision on their part- like Dell and other HW folks, they should learn to be OS agnostic, knowing that variety in OS leads to more HW sales. Oh well... ~luge
Yeah, coincidence. There were some legal issues with the name, as the Lego Group is very protective of their trademark. Check out this post where the author discusses some of the problems. ~luge
Check out Michael Gasperi's page. It is far and away the most extensive discussion of sensor construction, and includes a long list of sensors that he and others have built. ~luge
I've really enjoyed them, but if it weren't for the class I'm TAing for, yeah they'd probably rot. On the other hand, I have it on good authority that cats can be quite terrified:) ~luge
... and so that I can be/.ed: A picture of 5 Mindstorms, which use reinforcement learning to learn to push trailers around a floor without jackknifing. I actually have access to 7, so if anyone has any suggestions on what to do with all of them... ~luge
Yeah, I figure I'm one of the luckiest guys in geekdom- I've spent the last two semesters getting class credit to play with legos, and got paid to do it over the summer. They are definitely worth the investment- the purest joy I've ever seen college kids have *in class* was CPS196 opening all of their kits on the second day of class. Check out the class page for links and pictures. ~luge
"Anybody know of an OSS equivalent of the Mindstorm stuff?"
Yep. Check out NQC or Forth(no links at the moment, sorry) or legOS. All are free (legOS is MPL) and reasonably well supported by their communities. If you want something reminiscent of the "good old days," you might do well to remember that reverse engineering is just as hard if not harder than DIY, and then take a look at kekoa's page. If he hadn't destroyed his bot, there would be no open source anything for the mindstorm. Very good geek stuff. ~luge
Yup. I've never once even opened the Windows CD. If you are a serious programmer, you wouldn't want that crud ported to Linux anyway- it is designed for kids, and you can't do serious work with it. Like the guys have said, check out legOS. ~luge
Jonathan has been quite active on the lego user group mailing lists, and he definitely knows his stuff- I'll be ordering the book soon. In the meantime, for those of you who aren't quite ready to buy the book, he has published an excellent list of online resources for Mindstorms. It is quite thorough, and a great place to start if you are thinking about buying a set and wondering what you can find online. ~luge(who is mentioned down there in ch. 10)
Unfortunately, I don't think it will be for a long time- phone service still reaches only ~98%, I don't think TV usage breaks %90, and the closest (in cost) comparable service is cable- which hits something like ~60% (IIRC). That is a big chunk of society that has no access whatsoever, and that won't change anytime soon, unless the government acts to subsidize access for the poor. ~luge
Cool. Thanks for all the answers all over the place. BTW, I've always thought your sig was one of the coolest in all of/. Good luck with coding and your other endeavours... ~luge
That would be cool- I'd love to see Civ:CTP continue to evolve into the game it could have been, or see what people will think of for MythII. More power to Loki for trying hard to be creative within the bounds of their Activision contracts. ~luge
Cool- Yeah, I guess when I said "won" I should have said "has a really fast new machine." Ok, so then two more questions: 1) How complete is the server-publishing hack? i.e., in how much detail can you study a public game? Can you see into cities? Scan the whole map? I've always wanted to watch computers play each other and this seems like it might be an interesting way to do that. 2) killer cows? Wow... I want to build some of those:) ~luge
Post Anonymously is still right there on my screen... and it is not so anonymous as logging out, unfortunately- I had moderated several posts in this thread, and then thought of some harmless questions. So I posted them anonymously and *Bang* all the moderation goes up in smoke. Oh well... ~luge
Yup. What they are basically claiming is that IT managers wouldn't want to apply those patches. C'mon, there is nothing at all of value on any of my three systems, and I keep them up to date on a daily basis. If I were paying someone to do IT for me, and they refused to do something I could do myself (rpm -ivh *) I'd personally clear their desk into the street. To claim that it wouldn't be done because autorpm "doesn't let you know what is going on to your system" is completely disingenous. ~luge
Really, it is a fine piece of software. No, it is not yet up to the stability levels we have come to expect. No, it is not on time (hello? W2K?) But it is featurful, standards compliant, and has a lot going for it, and I think anyone who actually runs a nightly binary (as I do 90% of the time) will see that. Furthermore, they are very responsive- I filed a bug report (li tags used by my favorite site were handled not quite correctly) and had it fixed within a week. It is already good, and will continue to get that way with your feedback. Go and grab a copy... ~luge (who is in a rush for class, thus the slight incoherence....)
What it looked like to me was that the entire article was already written, and then he noticed this whole/. thing, so he figured he'd throw a paragraph in (it did, after all, get posted here only the day before his deadline). I'd bet that if challenged, he might actually condescend to elaborate on the "ultimately flawed" claim. ~luge
People make iMac look-a-like disk drives because iMacs have no drives. People make iMac look-a-like mice because iMac mice stink. Clearly, there is a need for clear plastic in those products:) But you can't accesorize your iMac with this knife, because there is nothing to unscrew on an iMac!!! The only opening pops off- there is no way to open the rest of it up. What they need is a clear-plastic chainsaw to open up the iMac case... or a clear-plastic paperclip to reboot the things. ~luge
Can you say "this is not a typo" in french? I think the Magritte interpretation, if nothing else, at least gives me a little insight into someones sense of humor (if not necessarily any insight into the product...) ~luge
Actually, IIRC, the back end is a cluster (~200 nodes) of... drum roll please... linux boxes:) In fact, looking at their technical paper, it appears that their cluster is a mix of solaris and linux. However, they have designed it to be massively scalable with common hardware (this was a research project, after all) so they think it may be scalable (using the same Linux/Solaris mix) for a while. ~luge
I mean, think about it: if some guy writes a really bad-ass hack for it, who do you think is going to be the next hire for Loki? I'd put down good money that they end up hiring at least 3-5 of the guys who show up for this. Consider it an extended tryout. Besides- two expenses paid days in Atlanta ain't so bad, is it? ~luge
Gee, and I thought I was a baseball fan. Live and learn, I guess... of course, both the NBA and NFL champs call themselves the world champs, even if the game isn't called that... ~luge
I'm guessing (from my reasonably extensive lego experience) that what happened was that one (or both) of the robots was attempting to communicate with a base PC. If this occured during a download by the other robot, one signal could corrupt the other. In the worst case, this could happen while a new set of instructions (as opposed to an individual instruction) was being dl'd to the bot. This would cause a substantial bit of corruption, and could cause all kinds of fun stuff- like an unintended victory dance (read: spastic and uncontrolled rolling around.) ~luge
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There are tons and tons of European soccer lego-based bots. I can't find any links off of the top of my head, but my favorite one had an entire assembly of arms and motors to drive them. The purpose? To do a victory dance. None other. Crazy Europeans, heh? :)
~luge
They are still keeping the internals "secret," in the sense that if you ask The Lego Group for documentation on opcodes, hardware, etc., you'll get nothing from them. However, Kekoa Proudfoot tortured his RCX until it talked, which gave the community the data it needed for the various open OS's now available. The page detailing his work is here.
Once that work was done, the information was available, and the OS's were done. However, even then TLG nearly sued to keep the OS's off the web, according to Forbes. They did stop short of that, but still aren't at all cooperating. Poor business decision on their part- like Dell and other HW folks, they should learn to be OS agnostic, knowing that variety in OS leads to more HW sales. Oh well...
~luge
Yeah, coincidence. There were some legal issues with the name, as the Lego Group is very protective of their trademark. Check out this post where the author discusses some of the problems.
~luge
Check out Michael Gasperi's page. It is far and away the most extensive discussion of sensor construction, and includes a long list of sensors that he and others have built.
~luge
I've really enjoyed them, but if it weren't for the class I'm TAing for, yeah they'd probably rot. On the other hand, I have it on good authority that cats can be quite terrified :)
~luge
... and so that I can be /.ed:
A picture of 5 Mindstorms, which use reinforcement learning to learn to push trailers around a floor without jackknifing. I actually have access to 7, so if anyone has any suggestions on what to do with all of them...
~luge
Yeah, I figure I'm one of the luckiest guys in geekdom- I've spent the last two semesters getting class credit to play with legos, and got paid to do it over the summer. They are definitely worth the investment- the purest joy I've ever seen college kids have *in class* was CPS196 opening all of their kits on the second day of class. Check out the class page for links and pictures.
~luge
"Anybody know of an OSS equivalent of the Mindstorm stuff?"
Yep. Check out NQC or Forth(no links at the moment, sorry) or legOS. All are free (legOS is MPL) and reasonably well supported by their communities. If you want something reminiscent of the "good old days," you might do well to remember that reverse engineering is just as hard if not harder than DIY, and then take a look at kekoa's page. If he hadn't destroyed his bot, there would be no open source anything for the mindstorm. Very good geek stuff.
~luge
Yup. I've never once even opened the Windows CD. If you are a serious programmer, you wouldn't want that crud ported to Linux anyway- it is designed for kids, and you can't do serious work with it. Like the guys have said, check out legOS.
~luge
Jonathan has been quite active on the lego user group mailing lists, and he definitely knows his stuff- I'll be ordering the book soon. In the meantime, for those of you who aren't quite ready to buy the book, he has published an excellent list of online resources for Mindstorms. It is quite thorough, and a great place to start if you are thinking about buying a set and wondering what you can find online.
~luge(who is mentioned down there in ch. 10)
Unfortunately, I don't think it will be for a long time- phone service still reaches only ~98%, I don't think TV usage breaks %90, and the closest (in cost) comparable service is cable- which hits something like ~60% (IIRC). That is a big chunk of society that has no access whatsoever, and that won't change anytime soon, unless the government acts to subsidize access for the poor.
~luge
Cool. Thanks for all the answers all over the place. BTW, I've always thought your sig was one of the coolest in all of /. Good luck with coding and your other endeavours...
~luge
That would be cool- I'd love to see Civ:CTP continue to evolve into the game it could have been, or see what people will think of for MythII. More power to Loki for trying hard to be creative within the bounds of their Activision contracts.
~luge
Cool- Yeah, I guess when I said "won" I should have said "has a really fast new machine." Ok, so then two more questions: :)
1) How complete is the server-publishing hack? i.e., in how much detail can you study a public game? Can you see into cities? Scan the whole map? I've always wanted to watch computers play each other and this seems like it might be an interesting way to do that.
2) killer cows? Wow... I want to build some of those
~luge
Post Anonymously is still right there on my screen... and it is not so anonymous as logging out, unfortunately- I had moderated several posts in this thread, and then thought of some harmless questions. So I posted them anonymously and *Bang* all the moderation goes up in smoke. Oh well...
~luge
Yup. What they are basically claiming is that IT managers wouldn't want to apply those patches. C'mon, there is nothing at all of value on any of my three systems, and I keep them up to date on a daily basis. If I were paying someone to do IT for me, and they refused to do something I could do myself (rpm -ivh *) I'd personally clear their desk into the street. To claim that it wouldn't be done because autorpm "doesn't let you know what is going on to your system" is completely disingenous.
~luge
Really, it is a fine piece of software. No, it is not yet up to the stability levels we have come to expect. No, it is not on time (hello? W2K?) But it is featurful, standards compliant, and has a lot going for it, and I think anyone who actually runs a nightly binary (as I do 90% of the time) will see that. Furthermore, they are very responsive- I filed a bug report (li tags used by my favorite site were handled not quite correctly) and had it fixed within a week. It is already good, and will continue to get that way with your feedback. Go and grab a copy...
~luge (who is in a rush for class, thus the slight incoherence....)
What it looked like to me was that the entire article was already written, and then he noticed this whole /. thing, so he figured he'd throw a paragraph in (it did, after all, get posted here only the day before his deadline). I'd bet that if challenged, he might actually condescend to elaborate on the "ultimately flawed" claim. ~luge
People make iMac look-a-like disk drives because iMacs have no drives. People make iMac look-a-like mice because iMac mice stink. Clearly, there is a need for clear plastic in those products :) But you can't accesorize your iMac with this knife, because there is nothing to unscrew on an iMac!!! The only opening pops off- there is no way to open the rest of it up. What they need is a clear-plastic chainsaw to open up the iMac case... or a clear-plastic paperclip to reboot the things. ~luge
Can you say "this is not a typo" in french? I think the Magritte interpretation, if nothing else, at least gives me a little insight into someones sense of humor (if not necessarily any insight into the product...)
~luge
Umm... not on a large scale, not for at least another year, IIRC.
luge
Actually, IIRC, the back end is a cluster (~200 nodes) of... drum roll please... linux boxes :) In fact, looking at their technical paper, it appears that their cluster is a mix of solaris and linux. However, they have designed it to be massively scalable with common hardware (this was a research project, after all) so they think it may be scalable (using the same Linux/Solaris mix) for a while.
~luge
I mean, think about it: if some guy writes a really bad-ass hack for it, who do you think is going to be the next hire for Loki? I'd put down good money that they end up hiring at least 3-5 of the guys who show up for this. Consider it an extended tryout.
Besides- two expenses paid days in Atlanta ain't so bad, is it?
~luge
Gee, and I thought I was a baseball fan. Live and learn, I guess... of course, both the NBA and NFL champs call themselves the world champs, even if the game isn't called that...
~luge
I'm guessing (from my reasonably extensive lego experience) that what happened was that one (or both) of the robots was attempting to communicate with a base PC. If this occured during a download by the other robot, one signal could corrupt the other. In the worst case, this could happen while a new set of instructions (as opposed to an individual instruction) was being dl'd to the bot. This would cause a substantial bit of corruption, and could cause all kinds of fun stuff- like an unintended victory dance (read: spastic and uncontrolled rolling around.)
~luge