lego

/lego108

Discussions about Lego.

Wife scored me a decent haul of free technic parts and snot pieces from a swap group. Came in a nice compartment box too. Had to wash it all since it was a bit funky, but good as new now. I think a good deal of it came from some marine themed kit.
Kinda silly build today, a tank with legs for some reason. Will take better video after batteries charge back up. Just a few more builds and I’ll be done with this manual and on my own.
Ok, I’m kinda addicted. Stamping/hammering/pounding machine. Really wish I’d had these in high school before I went to college for mechanical engineering.
This build was kinda dumb. The gear on top with little gears is just a face. I thought it might do something clever.
This is a clever design. Didn’t realize till halfway into the building before understanding the motion.
I'll be doing a session on kits and protocols, featuring a lot of talk about Lego and other kit-based things, in 5 minutes (12 Pacific, 7 UTC). https://app.sola.day/event/detail/8698
I need this in my life
This meccano model was a bitch to build compared to Lego technic. I spent like 20 minutes on just 1 nut-bolt in a tight place. And several of the steps involved bending the strips while fastening or coming in at an awkward angle and force fitting. This takes a lot more patience and strength+dexterity. I don’t think people with fat fingers could build it at all.
I can not WAIT to build this. Can’t believe how quickly it went back order so quickly! 🙌🏾🙌🏾
I always wanted LEGO. It's one of those things I wish my parents had understood: playing with LEGO isn't just playing, it's a way to unleash creativity. But back then, LEGO didn’t really help—they weren’t big on adult fans until about 5 years ago.

Now I'm really considering getting into the LEGO world (I'm 38, btw). Suggestions on first sets? I was thinking big, and I'm planning to buy the Titanic set (9090 pieces), but I'll read suggestions and think about them thoughtfully.
R.C controlled motorized knockoff technic achieved. Next milestone, driving such models with Arduino.
How would you represent the computational logic of Lego bricks?vFeels like someone should have studied/modeled this.

For eg, in a standard studs-on-top construction, a 1-stud plate grows a stack by 1 unit. OR it translates an active connection logic 1 unit. You can imagine larger bricks being matrix ops. Like a 2x4 brick is 3 units translation for a 2x4 matrix. You could probably represent this as a transformation matrix between input/output engaged studs matrices.
So I’m working through the designs in the manual that came with my Temu technics knockoff kit, which it turns out is some sort of k12 robotics test prep thing. After the first few models, every model recipe seems to have a slight bug in it. I think this might be deliberate? As a test?
I’m trying to improve the statistics📈🇫🇷
Lego System (the classic bricks) is pretty wysiwyg but Technic, which I didn’t have as a kid and did for the first time last year is pretty unintuitive. Because it builds inside out instead of bottom up. Instructions are trivial enough to follow but going from your own idea to a build is not just a brain dump.
Did you know 5, 10, 11 form an approximate Pythagorean triple? You can almost make a right triangle, as in this design (from Chinese instructions that came with my knock-off technic set)
I’m now part of the Chinese domestic economy. This Temu package of assorted knockoff technic parts comes complete with a Chinese-only instruction manual. All visual instructions though so I can follow them.

That’s how you know you’re getting a sweet deal 😎
Lego classic doesn’t smell Turing complete but Lego technic almost does
My first technic build a few months ago was a very complex $99 mars rover and I didn’t really form good construction intuitions so I bought a couple of the simplest $12.99 kits to do that. First one is this cute bulldozer.

(only had a couple of very simple classic kits growing up so I’m only now really grokking Lego)

Technic is a very powerful language 🫡.

Like the Hegelian dialectical child of Lego classic and meccano/erector.