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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

This is cool but useless. It's an impressive build but I don't see a single reason why Lego might want to sell that.

I can see real value in more interactive builds, teaching kids about machinery and logic. However this display that can only show simple animations and is too small to use as output for any sort of machine is not that.

Replacing batteries all over the place is already annoying enough as a parent, I don't think anyone is looking forward to buying Lego©® Mini Batteries ™ so that the fake computer screens keep showing a fake computer screen.

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LEGO has - for decades - has had a standard, very basic and awesome system of delivering electricity from a ‘power brick’ that contains standard AA or 9V batteries.

It’s very cool, they’ve got little metal clips under these special conductive bricks.

If you’ve ever played with MindStorms, you’ll know how bloody cool it is.

So you don’t have to worry about ‘Lego(c)(r) Mini Batteries’ - if you’d read the article; you’d see, that brilliantly - this is actually already the way the pieces are powered!

They have no batteries in them.

If you can’t see the value of working displays in especially a collector’s (adult) edition of, say, the X-Wing with that Death Star trench thing, then it’s not a product for you - but I assure you there are thousands of us who will happily say ‘shut up and take my money’ for such a thing.

And they could probably upgrade the system to transmit both power and a modulated signal to let the bricks communicate.

Quoting from the article:

> He tells The Verge he probably won't sell them — at least not without legal consultation and a small enough battery!

I know the 9V batteries exist but this is not the author's goal.

Pretty sure it’s the author of the article wanting Lego to produce and sell it, not the actual engineer who built it.

OP is questioning the use case besides aesthetics/superficial coolness, whether it is produced by lego or someone else.

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