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Any LEGO fans here ?


Triop

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The fate of all my lego:

Buy - build - enjoy for a while - deconstruct and merge with giant pile of random lego.

I presume its the same for everyone?

Does anyone ever build those "alternative" models that are sometimes illustrated on the box?

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On 4/4/2018 at 9:42 AM, p1t1o said:

The fate of all my lego:

Buy - build - enjoy for a while - deconstruct and merge with giant pile of random lego.

I presume its the same for everyone?

Does anyone ever build those "alternative" models that are sometimes illustrated on the box?

Yeah, I'd build a set, then think: "that that part would look good on a spaceship". The next day I'd completely deconstruct it and turn it into a spaceship.

I have loads of custom built Lego spaceships on my shelves, and some of them still look quite impressive, even though I was 12 when i made them. I even made a neat little Halo Warthog replica and Spartan mini figures that have little Mjolnir Mk VI helmets that you could order from some website that made custom bricks. Damn, I wanna get back into Lego someday.

Who else get's incredibly nostalgic whenever they see their old Lego Mars Mission boxes in the attic?

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On 4/4/2018 at 5:09 AM, Triop said:

Am I the only one ?

I tinkered around with them up until I was fifteen. About a year ago ish, when I was homeschooling and could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Now I'm in a regular school and a bit short on time :P

I used to make a lot of stop motion animations though......kinda miss doing that.

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Nope, no Lego here....

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Not mine, it all was given to my sons over a few years worth of birthdays and Christmases. But when I was on holidays after Christmas '16, it was all in pieces in buckets. I was tasked by my wife to put it all back together. It took a few weeks of sorting and downloading manuals, but I managed to get most of the kits back together. Since then, it's been put on that bookcase and the kids are only allowed to play with them  briefly before they have to put them back again, or else they would have been reduced to molecules again.

I would really like to get a full-size X-Wing, but I don't want to pay $80 for it. That's what I don't like about Lego, because it's so bloody expensive. Of course, the SSD, Millenium Falcon, and Death Star would be nice to have too, but I have better things to spend hundreds of kerfunds on.

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Legos are good.

I had many when I was a kid.  Now my kids have a whole bunch and their grandparents' house.  And at my house.

 

And I recently got the Lego Saturn V.  Somewhere I have the smaller Saturn V/Apollo CSM/LM set they released a decade and a half ago.

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  • 2 weeks later...

i got a bunch of old technic legos (pre studless era, some studless though). i rarely get them out. getting too old to sit on the floor hunched over a bucket of bricks. but i recently found myself in need of a 3d scanner for a completely unrelated project. now normally when i want to scan an object in 3d i have to take literally hundreds of photos of it from every conceivable angle, feed them into visual sfm, and hope my point cloud is usable enough to generate a mesh. i wanted to automate this process, but i didn't want a long drawn out 3d printing project. i figured i could do it with lego instead and save some time.

so over the last 2 days i build a scan rig (and yes i killed my back doing it), finished up the mechanical parts. first part was a turret. pretty basic, pretty much a direct worm to turret drive. except with a cam to hit a switch (from one of the old rcx mindstorms kits). i don't need precise positional data here, i just want a pulse every few degrees of rotation. i can use this to trigger the camera.

i can also count pulses so i know when a full 360 rotation has passed. for visual sfm to work, i need photos from different height levels so i build a large rack and pinon lift, it has a limit switch to find the lowest point. no positional feedback though, maybe il print me a lego-potentiometer adapter if i find i need it. i figure with the massive gear reduction on the lift i can just control the motor on time. if it over runs it will simply run out of rack and stop climbing. the requirement here is photos at different heights, no specific heighs are required, visual sfm will determine the orientation and position of the camera just using the image data, quite nifty.

i made a camera holder, and i can just put a bolt though a lego frame into the tripod mount on the camera (an old point and shoot camera running chdk so i can have a remote trigger) to keep it in place. the frame is geared to the lift such that it pans down as the lift rises, keeping the turret in the shot all with one motor. i thought about gearing the lift+pan to the turret but opted for a second motor, i also had the option of using a servo, but then feedback on the lift would have been essential. i could have used math to get the right angles, but i managed just fine on trial and error. i built it so i can very easily take a gear out of the drive train to adjust the centering should the need arise.

now i could very well control the whole kitten caboodle with either the rcx or the nxt bricks i have (the nxt would have been much easier as both motors have encoders built in, and i could have had a nifty ui). but im going to use an arduino. first of all my lego wiring is ancient and is in pretty bad shape (the insulation was literally disintegrating on me during tests. second, i also need to control the camera. thats its own little hack in itself since my camera doesnt support remote shutter (fixable with a firmware mod and a diy cable). i think i can trigger the camera directly from an arduino pin. i could probibly stick a relay or transistor on the nxt or rcx and control it that way, but id rather just be able to plug it in and go (and not have to include another power supply). as for power im going to be running off a 12v wall wart, which i will split between the aruino and the motor controller, the arduino's regulator provides the 5v for the logic signals, and camera trigger. probably going to use hardware low pass filters for both switches, they are old and probably bounce a lot. 

program is going to be something like this:

1 home the lift

2 activate the turret until i get a rising edge off of the switch

3 take a photo

4 repeat 2 and 3 until the turret has rotated 360 (by counting iterations, the number of times depends on the gear ratio that i haven't determined yet)

5 raise the lift abit (gonna need to time it with a stop watch to determine a good height to time ratio)

6 repeat 4 and 5 2 or 3 more times (im probibly going to fill my sd card too fast if i do too many vertical iterations)

7 done

after that pull the sd card and feed the images to the computer, and be glad i bought an i7 instead of an i5.its an extremely cpu intensive process. id show some pics but its an incredibly ugly apparatus. maybe after i get the electronics sorted out. 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
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