Lego Biotech Bot

This is pretty cool

Not sure about getting a twerp to introduce it… unless he actually built it himself, in which case I apologise, and cover myself in shame. He does that sort of patronising “explanatory gesture” with his hand that Robert Plant did in stairway to heaven, which is fairly annoying. I don’t know why, it just is.

Still… lego. Check this out:

Someone’s made their own lego-assembly-line, for sorting out coloured blocks. Bit rickety, but it works. I think the world needs (and is sooner or later going to get) a better lego for doing this sort of thing.

There are various attempts at it going on now… various plug-together electronic bits – littlebits being a notable recent example:

littleBits intro from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.

I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of extruded aluminum offerings as well… I happen to know this because I funded one of them on kickstarter. I’m not sure that these are “the future” though… well… not the whole future. Littlebits might be part of it.

I think what will happen is that the lego will be virtual. It’ll be a set of designs for standard components that (just) work together. All the tolerances, and hole-sizes and cog ratios and whatnot will have been already worked out… and you’ll be able to build something virtually, then either CNC it yourself, our buy the parts off the shelf – which might be cheaper because they’re made in China by the metric ton.

A couple of days back there was a flurry of articles about this cute little desktop CNC machine. It looked a bit like one of the space-ships off the ill-advised late-period star-wars franchise. Damned if I can find it now. What people say about “once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever” isn’t actually true. Stuff gets lost all the time. Try to find a tweet you made 2 years ago. See how you get on.

Still, never mind about that.

Building blockability is the thing… what needs to be built into this process is something (like software) where people don’t have to re-CAD wheels, so to speak. Something where they can print out complete gearboxes without having to make all the little bits etc.

This blog post kindof started badly, then went to pieces – basically because I spent about 3 hours trying to find that little CNC machine. Incredible. Maybe I was imagining the whole thing.

Whatever. Here’s a picture of a car made out of bamboo or something.

Which according to the blurb has actually been made – although that picture looks like cgi to me.