pleegwat

That's actually not how pile drivers work. The block contains a 2-stroke diesel engine, with the top of the pole acting like the cylinder. The thuds you hear is not the block hitting the pole, but the diesel detonating and pushing the pole down and the block back up. Though it's well possible the model uses the sudden drop mechanism one would think of intuitively.

When was a kid, I've always kept the technic sets separate from the city ones and rarely cross-pollinated. Though some part of that may have been that my brother and me did not keep our system/city collections separate, I really never felt a need to combine the two in one model.

What bothers me on the pile driver, apart from the boom height which is already mentioned, is that I've never seen a wheeled pile driver IRL. Big or small, they're always tracked.

You can hack it (in firefox or chrome at least, not sure on IE, not on mobile) by right-clicking the dropdown, clicking 'inspect element', then in the element inspector that pops up delete the selected node, move on to its parent etc. until the button is reachable again. It'll be back next time you go to the next page, but at least it lets you edit.

Lego did at some point publish the infrared coding they used. They may do so for the bluetooth as well, and I know the sbrick bluetooth interface is published. Even then, I don't see either lego or sbrick do any more than that to support a combined app.

"Download free App" is on every right-hand page of that catalogue, so it probably relates to the catalogue itself and not to power up or power functions.