Ev3dev: Debian for Lego Mindstorms | Hacker News Reader

Ev3dev: Debian for Lego Mindstorms

ev3dev.org

102 pointsTomte11 comments

I used to work as an iOS engineer at LEGO. They're a phenomenally professional company who consistently pushes innovation in-house. I'd be shocked to see them react negatively to this.

I used to tinker with the older version of Mindstorms with Java and .NET, can confirm they were all about helping us as much as possible when setting up the intro to robotics course at the local comm. college.

Love the idea and effort behind this, but concerned as to how Lego is going to react. The fact that they don't appear to hack the original software, but use a dual-booting arrangement is probably good news.

Lego hasn't reacted yet, and if I remember correctly this has been around for ~4+ years

The founder of the project, Ralph Hempel, works for LEGO now.

It's also used internally in LEGO.

I am pretty sure this is exactly what the SD card slot on the EV3 is designed for. That and science experiment data logging in the education edition.

Lego has a pretty good police called 'fair play'.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/legal/legal-notice/fair-play

This side-steps some of the more sordid parts of Lego's own history but still it is a step in the right direction.

I heard a rumor that the Ev3dev Kernel guys got 4-color mode for the display of the original ev3 brick to work. Not even the lego guys managed to do that.

Will possibly happen very soon-ish.

It's such a pity that the actual Lego is so insanely expensive.

You can replace the actual ev3 brick with a raspberryPi based BrickPi or PiStorms. Then a motor or sensor is about 30 bucks and you might have some lego technic already lying around.

It's hard to argue that it's cheap but I believe the value is there. The quality of their products tends to be second to none and the freedom to combine and it also seems hack is phenomenal.

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