You buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms bricks and you start building a robot to remotely control your mobile devices.
Well, that’s the official explanation.
The actual explanation is that this is what happens when you are 26 years of age, your girlfriend tells you you are almost 30 and that when you are 30 it’s the end of your youth (although, people of that age usually tell me this ain’t true), you are a nerd of the type software developer (and quite addicted to this too), you have your own business and therefore your accountant asks to make some expenses (like .. buying a Mindstorms robot! No?).
I acknowledge it’s probably just an early midlife crisis. Boys want to make things, fiddle with stuff, put things together. Whereas girls, girls just wanna have fun. I’m totally guilty of being a boy. I know. (although, I’m sure a lot of girls enjoy making things too — before I get killed by a group of feminists –).
Now that the model itself is finished, I clearly see what I am becoming: an old lonely dude who plays with trains, electricity stuff and mostly breaks things just to put them back together. I’ll probably die getting electrocuted while trying to take apart a by that time old holographic 3D gesture recognizing display, as I’m trying to figure out whether some evil corporation is spying on its customers by using such electronic devices.
But, isn’t that cute? No? I mean, Tinne, seriously, now I must be ‘like’ a younger dude, no? I have been playing with toys for kids aged 11 to 16 (that’s what the Lego box’s age indicator says, so it must be true). Anyway, the only way that it can get worse now, is if I’ll start writing software for this Lego model. I’ll have a camera view on my screen where I can mouse-over so that the robot will follow my mouse pointer. With a library like GStreamer I can let that camera image go efficiently over a distance. Sending some commands over a socket ain’t very hard.
About the bot itself: it has three axis. One (the X one) uses normal wheels, two others (Y and Z) are built on top of the chassis. All axis are controlled by Mindstorms motors. The Mindstorms computer thing is integrated in the model, there’s a touch sensor on one of the axis (the Z one). I don’t yet have this software, that’s the next thing I’ll (try to) finish. I’ve spend ~ 450 euros on this thing (the normal Mindstorms package didn’t have enough bricks, but the programmable thing, the sensors and the motors are ~ 300 euros).
But hey, 450 euros for something that you could give to a little fellow as soon as you are done playing with it? That’s not much for multi functional and multi age toys! I mean, if I get bored of this thing, I can make another robot with it. If you have a son (or a technical minded daughter), you can let him (or her) play with the Lego bricks while watching his (her) brains grow! You can’t convince me that today’s computer games are better for training a kid’s brain than Lego.
After the kid is finished building the bot, you can make the software for it. Hah! Perfect father – son (or daughter) relationship. You actually help him make his toys, and you enjoy doing that! And … he’ll get interested in software development, join one of the many free software communities, he’ll find a job in IT as programmer, etc etc.
Lego rocks!