Generally speaking, there are three things in life that make everything better: LEGOs, robots and iPads. Here’s a video that combines all three things. It’s the blogging equivalent of eating bacon, drinking a beer and having sex all at the same time.
Pheromone Labs had a problem. They had been tasked to create a stop-motion iPad application for a client, and they needs to stress test the software by taking 10,000 photos with the app.
Sure, you could just get some greasy intern to do it. But their solution is novel. Using an old LEGO RCX set from the 1990s, they created a robot that cycles through snapping an image, previewing it, and then returning to take the next image capture… all powered by an old 8-bit microprocessor and 32kb of memory to fit the firmware and programs. Rad.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
10 responses to “This LEGO Robot Helped Beta Test A New iOS App [Video]”
Brilliant!
OR they could do unit testing (part of Xcode).
Real world tests are the final stage of testing. You can never truly know something works 100% unless you are doing it on the actual device.Â
Clever idea, but nothing really innovative about it. Now if you had the robot navigating the apps on the iPad, then we can talk. Â
it’s cool but you’ve obviously never eaten bacon, drink a beer and had your oats at the same time, it’s close but not that close!