On New Years MAKE kicked it the virtual world. Here’s what I was wearing in the real life (more about this soon). Here are a couple photos sent from the all night dance-a-thon. Lastly, a quick video of some pixels getting funky! Special thanks to Eric for putting on this spin-dig.
Escher’s “Relativity” in LEGO! “…our fourth Escher picture rendered in LEGO. Once again, no camera tricks, but the picture has to be taken from exactly the right place, and boy did we get tired of trying to find where that place was. The whole thing took five or six evenings spread over two or three weeks. Most of the last evening was taken up with setting up the lighting the way we wanted it and trying to get the camera position just right…” Thanks Techhat! Link.
How to make the engine usually found in the BEAM solar roller – “…the most common use is in a solaroller which is a small wheeled car that charges up and then moves in a quick burst of speed. Since you can only use motors and coils with this circuit robots built with this circuit are mainly mechanical such as my artistic butterflies. One other common use is a little thing called a symet which can roam around and not get stuck using only one motor.” Link.
Martyn sent along some more photos of the LEGO Pinball machine we previous posted. The LEGO pinball machine is made from +20.000 bricks and 13 RCX units that communicate in 2 communication chambers each with a seperate program. Build time was +300 hours. It runs on NQC software and it’s ALL Lego, except for the ball. Link.
This appears to be a LEGO 3D milling machine / CNC router. The site has photos of the specific X, Y and Z motors – along with an example of a 3D part being milled out. There are not a lot of details, but it’s really impressive – is there anything LEGOs can’t do? Thanks Karel! Link.
We’ve covered some of the LEGO software, but it’s always worth another looksie, it appears LEGO has added more resources for designing your own LEGO bot – JBB writes “Lego factory A boon to lego robot builders, the lego factory lets you build a virtual model of your unique lego structure and order those blocks as a custom set. Add your robot’s sensors and other such items, and you’ve got a beautiful custom robot.” Link.
Here are some LEGO man jewelry from Plastic Bat Jewelry – one set is a LEGO man head dangling from earrings, the other is a pretty nice bracelet complete with blocks and a full size LEGO dude. If you’re a crafty-maker type, you could likely make these on your own too. [