Long-Distance LEGO Collaborations (or How the Internet Changed Everything, Again... With LEGO)
Blogs, forums, and file sharing have changed the face of how we interact... but I'm guessing I don't really need to tell that to anyone reading a blog, right? About a month ago I was contacted by a NXTasy (may it rest in peace) user, David Bell, about developing a robot that could produce a bar graph style display of CO2 measurements for a public 4-H display. He even offered to ship me all the LEGO parts, sensors, everything needed, & pay for the materials I might need to acquire. Even to compensate me for my time.
The reason wasn’t that I was in a mean mood, or that I’m independently wealthy (feel free to throw those tens and twenties this way folks!). It co
mes down to I do this for fun, and if I can help others out in the process, so much the better… and if we can all do it dirt cheap, fantastic! So instead of them shipping everything to me, and me producing a “product”, we decided to collaborate long-distance. The goal was to produce an NXT-based robot that could draw a series of physical lines in a big display, and to have it all built & working by 2 Oct 2010 for the National Youth Science Day in Walnut Park, Petaluma, CA. David would have the HW, and he worked long-range with the folks at Vernier to interface their CO2 detector (which requires too mu
ch power to work straight off a sensor port) with the NXT. Meanwhile David & I discussed (& discarded) various plans for the robot, and I built a very simple one that could drive around and draw lines on a sheet of melamine. I documented it with pictures, and then emailed him the pictures so he could build a copy, while I wrote a test program for the sensor (which I’d never seen or used). Once we got the sensor working, I wrote a program to get the robot to draw lines, while David tested the sensors responses to establish how well it worked & its limits, providing me feedback in the form of pictures and videos. This design process went ‘round and ‘round several iterations, with me sending detailed commented programs to him and him building a table for it to work on and testing it, before suggestion further revisions to me.
mes down to I do this for fun, and if I can help others out in the process, so much the better… and if we can all do it dirt cheap, fantastic! So instead of them shipping everything to me, and me producing a “product”, we decided to collaborate long-distance. The goal was to produce an NXT-based robot that could draw a series of physical lines in a big display, and to have it all built & working by 2 Oct 2010 for the National Youth Science Day in Walnut Park, Petaluma, CA. David would have the HW, and he worked long-range with the folks at Vernier to interface their CO2 detector (which requires too mu
ch power to work straight off a sensor port) with the NXT. Meanwhile David & I discussed (& discarded) various plans for the robot, and I built a very simple one that could drive around and draw lines on a sheet of melamine. I documented it with pictures, and then emailed him the pictures so he could build a copy, while I wrote a test program for the sensor (which I’d never seen or used). Once we got the sensor working, I wrote a program to get the robot to draw lines, while David tested the sensors responses to establish how well it worked & its limits, providing me feedback in the form of pictures and videos. This design process went ‘round and ‘round several iterations, with me sending detailed commented programs to him and him building a table for it to work on and testing it, before suggestion further revisions to me.The robot is sort of cute, and works really well for what it does (and is built with only the Retail 2.0 kit)… but there are certainly better Turtle-style robots out there (Marty, from the Idea Book 1.0 for instance). But in my opinion, the real coolness here isn’t in the robot.
Comments
Congrats to a job well done!
Remembers me of the Rock and Scissors playing robot you, Jim and me created in a similar long distance collobaration back then in 2006.
I have experienced over the last four years that this sort of projects is working quite well with a limited number of team members (three? four?), but that it's apt to fail once the number exceeds a certain amount (not sure where's the border, but eight seem to be too many already).
I found that one of the hazards of pure virtual (Internet) communication is the lack of visual feedback by the partner in question and her non-lingual signals - a lot of (if not most) of the frictions and problems in pure virtual communication arise from that, I presume.
Hence I take it that projects where the team members meet at least occassionally "in real life" are much less poised to failure than pure virtual ones.
Large-scale internet collaboration can certainly function (ever read a wiki?), but it does take some special coordination, and sometimes a special temperament.
And I might add that in addition to a good deal of coordination, large-scale internet collaboration projects need tolerance for drop outs of some of its "cells" (in large wikis, for instance, it usually does not matter whether some of the contributors loose interest eventually).
Actually, the challenges of that sort of projects and its differences to "traditional" ones is a most interesting topic and yet to be explored by the PM gurus. Even more, as future industry will face an increasing proportion of them.