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Comment by keenerd | Hacker News Reader

> In this vide you can see even a remote control that I never had. I read also in wikipedia that there was a model with an interface to Commodore 64, a Lego Mindstorms predecessor!

Lego Logo predated Capsela and was mostly inspired from Seymour Papert's 1980 book, Mindstorms. It ran on an Apple II through a special daughtercard and was amazing.

I got to play with Capsela as well, but only ever the basic kit without any expansions. Mostly because of the astronomical price of the parts. I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone with a 3D printer trying to design a printable modular motorized construction kit.

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>I wouldn't be surprised if there is someone with a 3D printer trying to design a printable modular motorized construction kit.

Seems like 3D printing would only solve a tiny part of the problem. Some of those Capsela capsules have some pretty complex assemblies inside, which would still be a lot of manual work.

So? It would take hours to print each one. Five minutes snapping in the gears and shafts is no big deal. The children these toys are meant for have loads of free time. They could do that step themselves.

The problem is the price tag. None of those mechanisms are complicated. Simple gear boxes mostly. At the same time I was playing with Capsela I was also building those same gear mechanisms from scratch with Lego Technics.

If anyone is considering printing these, using off the shelf nylon gears would be a very good idea.

Thanks for sharing this bit of history. Very interesting given Seymour Papert is the inventor of Logo.

Do you have any link, reference or picture about lego logo?

Just found this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Logo

The kit was never sold to consumers, schools only. So there were limited numbers and not much information. This was the best I could find:

http://www.applefritter.com/content/lego-tc-logo

My memories of it are a little fuzzy. I only got to use the system for 1 year, when I was nine years old. There was no assistance, I had to open the Apple and set up the driver card myself, taught myself logo too. I spent every recess inside just to get more time on it. (The kit went to a different school every year.) Unfortunately I didn't grok algebra until the following year, so my programs were essentially simple lists of commands with no math and (at most) limit-switch logic.

wow, It looks very nice,

thank you very much!

Woah awesome. -- I remember using this at an after-school class when I was young. I'd forgotten the exact name and could never find it after.

I remember making a conveyor to sort blocks using a color? sensor. The older kids got to make and use the turtle, which just ran logo commands.

I recall using Logo in 3th grade at a Purdue University CS summer camp program. The camp was 1 week long and we stayed in the dorms like real university students - very cool! However, I don't recall any Apple computers. I think it interfaced to a PC using a serial cable. The next year the camp upgraded to Mindstorm kits and we used pbForth instead of the GUI RoboLab. pbForth's author, Ralph Hempel, came down from Canada to teach the camp. It was a true treat! Imagine a bunch of elementary students successfully learning Forth in a week!

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