#Lego island free how to
#Lego island free software

#Lego island free software

Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.Д«ut mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks.

#Lego island free how to

Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Obviously that is something you should then fix but instead the idea was - as far as I know - abandoned. The obvious next step was to allow anything created in such an environment to be immediately orderable, Lego experimented with that for a bit, shipping 'MOC's, but ended up having to withdraw it due to overwhelming success. If they had it would have been buried deep. The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego management, and that's why they couldn't have invented Minecraft.

Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as well: you have to sell far fewer sets to people with much deeper pockets to make money that way. Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them.