Subject:
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Re: Brute Force Brick
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 17 Dec 2004 23:35:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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1222 times
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In lugnet.robotics, Steve Hassenplug wrote:
> [Q: Is this for sale?/How can I get one?]
> A: John said right now he has no plans to mass-produce it. There are two things
> preventing him from selling them.
> 1) TLC has stopped selling electric plates. (these are required for the
> external connections)
I do see this as a pretty big impediment to custom LEGO electric parts. I've
run into this myself, just trying to make some simple light units. My solution
was this:
Using silver paint, paint leads on the side of a 2x2 brick (with the center
column removed of course), where the bottom metal connectors are in a real LEGO
part. Connect those to whatever guts are further in, towards the top of the
brick, and fill with potting epoxy to hide and protect those guts, leaving the
leads exposed.
This seems to work nicely, though it is rather fiddly and labor-intensive -- but
I hold some hope that, like soldering, it would get easier with practice.
But we're a creative bunch; surely we can come up with some solution (if not
this, then something else) to this problem of interfacing with LEGO electronics?
Can we find a way to stamp out real metal parts that would be just the right
size and shape to do it the way TLG does? Can we hack apart LEGO connection
wires and repurpose their guts? Something else?
> 2) Cost. How many people would pay $300 for one of these? (that's just a
> REALLY rough guess.)
Quite a few, I suspect... that's not that much more expensive than a Mindstorms
set. Anybody who's banging their heads against the limitations of the RCX will
have already sunk more than that into their LEGO robotics, or so I imagine.
Best,
- Joe
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Brute Force Brick
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| Joe Strout wrote: > Can we hack apart LEGO connection (...) Didn't Lego also stop selling bulk packs of wires too? I thought I read that somewhere here. ---...--- Steve Baker ---...--- HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com> (...) (20 years ago, 17-Dec-04, to lugnet.robotics)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Brute Force Brick
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| (...) I've had a couple people ask me about this. I was lucky enough to get ahold of one of the prototypes. Let me see if I can answer a couple questions. [Q: How is it programmed?] A: The software is set-up much like the RCX. John wrote a compiler (...) (21 years ago, 4-Mar-04, to lugnet.robotics)
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