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Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

I always thought these were rediculously overpriced for what they do. LEGO certainly aims at state-sponsored educational institutes to pay huge $ for their plastic crap with few motors and microcontrollers, not private people trying to buy an interesting and educational toy for their kids. Pehaps there are people here from this industry - why there are no affordable robotics kits these days? Are there any patents involved? Or the market is just too small for anyone to care? I always thought that some sorts of meccano based kit with an MCU board & unified sensor/motor fixtures (preferrably even 3d-printable!) would be a total massive success.

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> plastic crap

You can argue that the electronics themselves are not that interesting, or that they are overpriced. That may be true. But Lego's manufacturing quality and QA is legendary. The fact that these robotics kits are seamlessly compatible with the entire system opens up some really fun possibilities.

I would recommend visiting a fan exhibition when things get back to normal. The things people come up with are astounding. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFD2e3IxO_c is the readiest example I could find).

Seconded. Literally 100% of the Lego I have from the early 1970s works perfectly with brand new sets.

The care they take in crafting new parts and the geometries involved is really insane.

A culture of consistent product management strongly embedded into the company DNA ("The Lego System") is important for something like this to happen.

Without it high quality manufacturing and QA won't help.

Obligatory The System

> I always thought that some sorts of meccano based kit with an MCU board & unified sensor/motor fixtures (preferrably even 3d-printable!) would be a total massive success.

I would tend to agree with you on this, but the closest thing to that (mBot) is Chinese and frankly a total mess. You need quality hardware element and kit design, you need a holistic ecosystem approach, you need a solid, continous software investment/strategy, you need great product management, you need great documentation etc. None of that is present there.

In a way I guess it's similar to our software platform wars (i.e. Mac OS vs Windows, IOS vs Android etc).

I was spinning this idea long time ago already, but was always afraid to commit to anything, since I have zero knowledge of the market

There are TONS of cheaper robotics kits. None of them are as durable/reliable as LEGO.

they are not versatile and universal (i.e. a kit to build one particular hexapod or line-follower, not a kit for do it anything). Are all universal kit systems (meccano, lego) patented?

This was the thing that struck me when I ran a Mindstorms summer camp a bunch of years ago: The kids were learning to program the brick with a programming language, but the physical design of the robots they made was, itself, a kind of 'physical programming.'

And legos, more than most things, are thus programmable structures. Recall that lots of early computers (for example, the one on Apollo missions) were NOT re-programable. The code was encoded in the physical form, and couldn't be moved around without essentially re-manufacturing the device. The step to programable computers was a major milestone.

Legos make a similar leap in an engineering space instead of a computational space; it's super cool.

Lego's robotics stuff might be patented but their core brick isn't anymore. However the generic replacements like Mega Bloks just don't snap together nearly as well as LEGO. For a toddler making a little garden out of a few blocks it's fine, but you can easily make a vertical Duplo stack that's 3 times taller than the maximum stack you can make with Mega Bloks, and that kind of structural integrity becomes very important in robotics.

You should look into Chinese brands such as Lepin. Their quality is so good that they get fakes of their own!

https://geekspin.co/lego-lepin-fake-toys/

Meccano is 120+ years old, so no patents to worry about there.

The key difference is that the most families with boys have several thousand dollars worth of LEGO that they can use with the robot.

My understanding is that LEGO changes their molds very frequently, leading to greater expense but if you've ever played with "off brand" versions of the same thing, it's easy to see why it's important. I'm sure there's also just a brand surcharge. Of course as a socialist I wish all of this was open source and not-for-profit. But given private ownership and the profit motive, I'm pretty happy with LEGO quality.

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