Tag: lego

Light Box

Yesterday I built this light box using the instructions on Strobist (thanks to Masoko Tanga, linked from The Brothers Brick). I elected to leave the “floor” intact since it helps keep the posterboard backdrop in place. The sides and top are made from tissue paper that I found among my Christmas wrapping paper supplies.

Light Box

At some point I plan to get a third desk lamp, or maybe I’ll get really ambitious and buy some flash units for the camera and do it right. In the meantime, I reshot photos of my Micropolis modules using the light box and uploaded them yesterday; see the updated Micropolis set for all the pictures, old and new.

(Please pardon the mess in the background…)

BrickWorld here I come

I just made my flight and hotel reservations and signed up for BrickWorld (in Chicago, June 18-21)! Hope to see you there…

Anyone want to share a room? I’m currently signed up for a room at $119 but they only had king-bed rooms available, but I put a request in the “special requests” box for a 2-bed room. But if you have a 2-bed room and want to share the cost, I might cancel mine.

BayLUG Meeting, April 4, 2009

Today we had a meeting of Bay Area LEGO Users Group at Johannes’s church in San Leandro.

BayLUG Meeting, April 4, 2009I brought the 10181 Eiffel Tower that I won as a door prize at BrickFest last weekend. I also took along my LOVE and LEGO sculptures, so that if you look at the tower as a letter “I” it would spell out the same message as seen on my car’s license plate. I also brought the motor yacht for display, but that doesn’t spell anything…

Johannes brought along a great 30″x60″ castle scene, with just about every square inch taken up with minifigs, horses, and other medieval stuff either defending or storming the castle. Charles and Adrienne brought some Bionicle models some cars, and checkers/chess sets they’ve been working on, including a chess set for the blind that Charles is donating to a charity auction to benefit Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco. Paul brought an “oriental hall” he was working on, and a four story apartment building with a fully detailed interior, as well as some sets for sale. Bruce had his usual minifigs, mini train engines, and jeeps for sale, along with random $1 baggies of parts.

We had a great discussion of Mindstorms developments and Maker Faire plans with Steve Putz of Robotics Learning. Maybe we’ll start having more robotics activity in the club…?

BrickFest Photo Roundup

Man, did I take a lot of photos at BrickFest last weekend! I uploaded them all to Flickr from the hotel, but I’m still going through to add titles and descriptions. I also shot almost 3 hours of video which I haven’t even looked at yet.

The hotel net connection was spotty. I use the Flickr Uploadr program to upload files, and it apparently has some sort of bug that when the net connection drops during an upload, it uploads files again. I ended up with five copies of some of the photos! I had to manually delete the extras, and luckily I did it quickly before anyone had posted comments in all but one case – and that one case was a comment that was redundant anyway (the same observation had already been made on another photo).

The photos are organized into four sets: one for each day, and one for all the photos. Here are the links:

Enjoy!

BayLTC at TCA 2009

This past weekend (March 21-22), the Bay Area LEGO Train Club did a show as a part of the Nor-Cal Division of Train Collectors Association Cal-Stewart Meet. We set it up Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and then the show was open to TCA members all weekend, but only open to the public on Sunday March 22.

Group Photo

View the photoset or slideshow on Flickr.

This was probably the largest layout we’d ever done – we’d used all 28 tables in our club inventory before, but when we did it was to make the depth larger. This time we kept the depth at a maximum of 5 feet and went with a larger footprint.

Friday night we got a little desperate for track and baseplates, but we got enough reserves Saturday morning. With a great last-minute idea by Loren to add a lake next to the campground, and Bruce’s construction zone, we were able to cover the bare wood before the show opened. In the end, it turned out pretty good.

One nice thing about the trackplan for this show was the use of a “wye” on the outer loop and track leads in both directions on the inner loop, enabling trains to be switched in and out of the yard on both loops in both directions without “hand of god” operations (except for those locomotives that can’t go backwards…). It was also visually interesting to have one of the main lines run behind the downtown instead of having both loops run side by side all around.