
The Free Universal Construction Kit - danboarder
http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
======
derefr
After the initial reaction of "Neato!" I started thinking what it would mean
if when I first got my legos (a big tub, hand-me-down from an older cousin),
they had come with a few dozen of these. I can't imagine _what_ I would have
built, but it certainly would have been more interesting... and I might have
grown up with somewhat stronger convictions about interoperability and the
senselessness of walled gardens :)

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't find walled gardens senseless at all. One of the nice things about a
box full of Lego (not legos) is that you can take consistency for granted.
It's the difference between a language with a clear grammar and a pidgin
language.

I'm not against things like this, but there's no guarantee of interoperability
producing superior results. You're just as likely to end up with a chaotic
mess if you don't build with a plan in mind; one of the other benefits of a
single system is that it forces you into more creative problem-solving.

~~~
derefr
> Lego (not legos)

Actually, "Lego® bricks." Lego severely admonishes using their name as a noun,
whether pluralized or not. But, due to that admonishment and a thing called
reactance[1], I was being purposefully breezy with my language. :)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)>

~~~
vacri
Any time you see a demand to use special characters or formatting in 'how you
should refer to our stuff', feel free to completely ignore it, since at that
point it's just marketing fluff.

I remember one company whose marketing department demanded that every mention
of our product be in the assigned font, bolded, with part of the name
subscripted and ®'d. Even in support emails. Even in followups. They never saw
just how amazingly artificial it was and how it actually created (mild)
barriers to rapport with users. Needless to say, everyone in sales and support
that had a clue decided to put that directive into the round file.

~~~
andybak
I agree. However - 'Legos' is just stupid. Who decided a single brick was a
'lego' and therefore the plural was 'legos'? It sounds bizarre to me as a Brit
:)

PS It's maths, not math.

~~~
vacri
I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure what the rule is.

On the one hand you have 'Meccano', 'Playmobile' and similar, when referring
to collections of brand items.

But on the other hand, you would refer to a single brand car park as 'Toyotas'
or a collection of single brand laptops as 'Lenovos' without anyone batting an
eye.

I'm with you - 'legos' sounds stupid to me - but really I need someone more
formally trained in grammar for this one :)

~~~
alex-g
It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little
indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-
count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not
lots of kinds of grains), sand, snow, etc. They are not inflected for the
plural and do not take numbers - we say "three grains of sand" not "three
sands". It's plausible for Lego to work the same way - so "ten pieces of
lego", not "ten legos".

Perhaps in these oft-cited days of lego sets that _are_ more like a few big
pieces than lots of little pieces, people will start to think differently.

~~~
Timmmmbob
Exactly. In English "Lego" is a mass noun, like water and sand. We say "a
piece of lego" or "a lego piece" to identify a single brick.

I guess in American they don't treat it as a mass noun, and maybe they say "a
lego" instead of "a piece of lego".

------
Kliment
Unfortunately, the Makerbot is no longer open source, which rather ruins their
point in mentioning it (the UCK was first published before MB went closed and
evil, MB technology is entirely derived from originally open hardware and
software).

~~~
jacquesm
What's evil about it? You can simply build the older generation makerbot. It's
no different than what Apple did with FreeBSD and NetBSD by way of Next, apart
from the fact that Apple did not actually make FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Anybody, including Makerbot could make a commercial successor to Makerbot.

~~~
Kliment
What's evil is taking open hardware and closing it. There is nothing in their
machine that is not a direct derivative of GPL-licensed reprap technology, and
they give neither attribution nor source back. In addition, they are patenting
technology developed openly. It's a pretty disgusting thing to do.

~~~
jacquesm
I agree it's disgusting. So, the best way to deal with it is very simple:
utterly ignore them. Those patents aren't worth the paper they are printed on,
prior art abounds. The hobbyist community won't care about those patents at
all, but any other commercial entity they plan to sue will wipe them out with
_their_ portfolio, CNC stuff is a patent minefield. Okuma, Heidenhain, Bosch,
Deckel and tons of other very large, very wealthy and established companies
will not be impressed at all and have enough patents of their own that they
could probably stop them from going to market at all if they desired to do so.

Additive or subtractive, it's a detail and lots of these companies are active
in both fields.

I really don't see the problem. Simply ignore them, beat them on price and
features and they'll go to their deserved end, which is to cease to exist.

And if you want to speed it up then you should sue them for taking what's
yours (if you were a contributor to some bit that made it into their
commercial offering), a lawsuit testing the GPL in that fashion is overdue
anyway. Probably they'll fold before it goes to trial, as they always do.

~~~
Kliment
Ignoring them is my strategy as well, but it doesn't help that others are
mentioning them so prominently as an open option. I felt it was necessary to
say something to point out this is no longer the case.

------
jacquesm
I had both Fisher Technik and lego, and combining them in one project required
some serious fiddling. I'd rigged my own connector pieces, some lego blocks
with the stubs cut off glued to some fisher elements. Even without a 3D
printer, if you want it badly enough and you can afford to sacrifice a few
pieces there are ways to get what you want.

When I was a kid fisher technik was considered better than lego but far far
more expensive. There were analog electronic and logic blocks and it was (far)
easier to make functioning machinery with Fisher Technik than it was with lego
(back then the lego robotics revolution had definitely not happened yet).

------
mproud
Whether it was intentional or not, it’s hard to ignore the acronym, when
spelled out.

------
kiba
I am puzzled by the non-commercial restriction. If someone could produce those
kits and sell them at scale, it will make such kits more universally
accessible.

~~~
reycharles
"Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes
such corporate prerogatives as copyright, [etc.]. [...] the public is legally
allowed to make 3D prints that mate with proprietary parts, especially in
cases (the “Must Fit Exception”) where a piece’s shape “is determined by the
need to connect to or fit into or around another product”"

Further down he notes that this only holds for private _and_ non-commercial
use.

------
doctorstupid
The FUCK?

~~~
danboarder
I see what you did there. (to people downvoting parent, it's the acronym for
this kit)

~~~
rralian
Right, that jumped out at me right away, and I wasn't sure if this was a
parody or not. Seems like an unnecessary inside joke for something ultimately
for kids.

------
abcd_f
Am I the only one who doesn't find this terribly exciting? I mean, it's a neat
idea, but I don't see it to be that interesting to actually play with.

The beauty of each set is its self-consistency. If you attached this to that,
then there's a good chance that 3rd and 4th will fit right in too. But once
you start mixing sets, all the proportions fly out of the window and so to
assemble something meaningful you would still need to build modules from the
same set and then use these adapters to connect them together. Nice to have,
certainly, but it doesn't sound _that_ dramatically more interesting.

------
spot
i don't see how this could really work.

the tolerances required for legos to work are quite small. they mention this
in the implementation section which says they use 2.5 micron measurement.

but 3D printers are not nearly so accurate. makerbot's page says their latest
is 100 micron.

so if you print the design, it will have the wrong measurements.

what's missing here?

~~~
Caerus
It's just a coupling system. If you want to attach Legos to K'Nex, they will
work fine in a handful of spots.

Building an entire structure out of an AM construction set would be a
disaster. Even professional grade printers aren't even close to 2.5 micron.

------
nborwankar
This is an interface mapper for hardware. V. cool.

------
csummers
So, this is the kid version of The Universal Business Adapter?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I>

------
nezza-_-
Is their logo for 'Free Art' just the NBC logo mirrored and with other colors?
Even the pecker is in it ...

------
ars
It's not actually free items, it's free plans.

This is not a good title.

~~~
lolnope
Think free as in freedom, not as in beer.

~~~
chousuke
Maybe they ought to call it Libre Universal Construction Kit instead.

~~~
LeafStorm
That would certainly form a more palatable acronym.

