Comment on You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t available yet

• AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Turns out there’s not actually much functionality in these at all. An RFID reader and an RGB LED, whoop-de-shit.

  Where did you get that idea? They have an RFID reader and LED, yes, but they also have a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, light and color sensor, near-field magnetic position detection, and then have to fit the battery alongside all of that, all in a 2x4 brick.

  Here’s an example of what cutting-edge brick tech could look like.

  That brick has a fixed option for what it displays without needing to be entirely reflashed, requires a 4x8 powered baseplate to operate, and compared to the smart brick, doesn’t have RFID, LEDs, sound, color, or light sensing capabilities, no accelerometer, and no ability to detect other bricks near it, along with having no internal battery.

  The smart brick can play different (fully interchangeable without firmware reflashing) sounds based on nearby minifigures and interactable buttons and levers, can display lights and sounds based on rotation and movement, can change how it interacts based on nearby smart bricks, and can also be charged wirelessly and operate standalone. And of course, it’ll be able to respond to sounds later on too.

  The brick from hackaday has a display. That’s it. It’s cool, yes, but it’s nowhere close to the smart brick.

  source

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    OK, looks like they actually integrated the speaker, which wasn’t clear at the initial reveal. That’s an improvement. The rest of the sensors fit in basically zero space, so that’s not so impressive, especially since a 2x4 brick has about triple the internal volume as a 2x2 slope brick.

    Doesn’t have … LEDs … color

    It’s a 72x40 OLED display, so that’s actually 2,880 LEDs, on the order of 1,000× as many LEDs as a single RGB LED.

    It can also play Doom.

    source