Wired’s Michelle Delio has written a very good summary of people in the Lego community who hacked the source code for the Lego Mindstorms and then created Mindstorms versions of popular computer programming languages such as Java.
Rather than send out cease and desist letters, the Lego folks decided to embrace this move and sales of Mindstorms are going through the roof.
One of the highlights of Delio’s article is she mentions and the article links to the site of 11-year-old Marcus Fischer Mellbin who has built some amazing things out of Legos. I’ve seen lots of cool Lego projects, but he actually built a working kinetoscope out of Legos. The Kinetoscope was Thomas Edison’s first successful crack at a motion picture machine and Mellbin’s Lego version is simply inspired. He’s only 11 but engineering firms should be courting this kid now.