Maker Faire 2011

My local LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group, has been displaying at Maker Faire every year since it started in 2005. Maker Faire is an amazing event, full of all kinds of creativity, from knitting to robots to welding to music. A lot of the art cars and artistic displays that Burning Man is famous for can be seen at Maker Faire in a much more pleasant climate. Regardless of your hobby, it’s a hobbyist’s paradise. And if you’re ever looking for a new hobby, it’s the perfect place to find one.

We had just over 20 club members participating to some degree, at various points during the setup and event. We set up the tables and displays Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and opened to the public at 10am Saturday. I have no idea how many thousands of people came through, but the crowds were nonstop all weekend. The show wrapped up at 6pm last night and we quickly tore down and packed up the display.

We had a 40′ by 50′ space set aside for our club to use, and we divided that up into four distinct areas.

In one corner we had a train/town layout, which is where I spent most of my time. We had a downtown area with buildings, cars, trucks, etc. I had two blocks, one featuring my Blackburn Hotel and other buildings, and the other with my City Park. We also had a suburb full of houses and smaller businesses, and a train yard for storing the trains that weren’t running. Inspired by the Log Cabin set, we had a little campground area featuring two of those cabins and one large one that I made out of three of that set. I also parked my RVs in that area, and we had a lake with an island full of bison/buffalo in the middle for reasons I don’t really understand, but they were cool buffalo. I called them the water buffalo. There was a large open space on the layout which we filled with creations built by kids in our MOC building area (see below).

Besides the town/train layout, we had a row of tables along one side with all sorts of other creations by our club members, including some of my sculpture pieces, Marcello’s Japanese Navy WWII ships, Charles’s spaceships, some Technic creations by Jeremy, and some of my assorted models including the big yacht and some of my 7-wide cars.

The other two corners of our space were devoted to a MOC building area and a Mindstorms demo area. In the MOC building area, we had bulk LEGO parts dumped out on the floor and kids of all ages were invited to build whatever they liked out of the parts. We displayed the parts on the train layout so that the kids could contribute to our display. The Mindstorms area featured live demonstrations of robots of various types run by Eva and Steve, who worked tirelessly all weekend showing the robots off to the public and teaching them about LEGO robots.

To see what it all looked like, click the photo below or click here for a slideshow of all the pictures.

Maker Faire 2011

City Park

At train shows, we (the Bay Area LEGO Train Club) have developed a standard city block system, where our downtown area is divided up into blocks that are 2 by 3 32 x 32 baseplates in size (i.e., 96 x 64 studs). For some time now I’ve shown my Blackburn Hotel and its accompanying city block (but I have never done a proper photo shoot of those buildings either, I just realized) at various shows and conventions and you have probably seen that featured here a few times.

For Bricks by the Bay and the upcoming National Train Show in Sacramento, I’ve built a second city block. But instead of tall buildings, it just features a city park. Each of the six baseplates has its own feature:

  • Tree and picnic/grassy area
  • Playground with swingset, slide, merry-go-round, and carousel
  • Life size (for minifigs) chess set
  • Flower garden
  • Basketball court
  • Tennis court

In addition, there is a fountain in the center and various tile mosaics and other decorative aspects. The whole thing is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with gates on each of the four sides.

I haven’t done a proper photo shoot of the park yet, but I did take detailed pictures of it at the most recent BayLUG meeting. I hope to take better pictures soon, but for now, take a look at these (click the image to view the set, or click here to view a slideshow)

BayLUG April 2011 Meeting

We had our April meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto on April 16, 2011. Lots of people brought models to share and/or stuff to sell, and we had a special activity for the kids where they could build skyscraper towers out of LEGO bricks and then test how they fare on an earthquake simulator table. Click for the pics from the meeting:

Bulkhead Flatcar

This Railroad flatcar with bulkheads was inspired by the NMRA 2011 official HO gauge car for this July’s convention in Sacramento.

Bulkhead Flatcar (bottom)

Bulkhead Flatcar (top)

Here’s a picture of the prototype I based it on:

NMRA HO gauge bulkhead flat car

A bunch of us are planning to put together a large LEGO layout at the NMRA convention in Sacramento this July. If you want to join the effort, check out the planning wiki and sign up to participate.

LEGO Conference Table

Have you seen this? An Irish advertising agency called Boys and Girls has commissioned their conference table to be made entirely of LEGO bricks. They hired the architectural firm abcg Architects to design and build the table for the agency’s conference room at their Dublin headquarters.

LEGO Conference Table

Check out the article at The Resident Architect for more pictures and information. There’s a stop-motion video showing how it was built at the end of the article.

Bricks by the Bay 2011 Registration now Open!

I’m happy to report that the registration form for the Bricks by the Bay 2011 LEGO convention is now available for general registration. I’ve been working hard with a team of volunteers (we can always use more help if you are interested) to get the convention organized and planned.

So if you’ve been waiting for this news to register for the convention, your wait is over. Head on over to the site now and sign up!

http://www.bricksbythebay.com/register/

Pink Fractal Tree

This is my first abstract LEGO sculpture. I was inspired by someone (sorry I don’t remember who it is right now) who brought several abstract art pieces to Bricks by the Bay last year made out of the dark pink 1×2 slopes, which were available at the LEGO store Pick-A-Brick wall. I always wanted to do the same and finally I got around to it, producing a series of small fractal models and eventually coming up with this monster.

I built this out of about two Pick-A-Brick cups’ worth of the slopes. It is what I call “lower-case F fractal” in that I don’t know if there’s any math behind it, but it does have self-similarity as I understand it. The basic element is 3 bricks stacked together with one going off to the side, and torqued as far as the slack in the parts will allow. Using that same angle (determined by the slack in the parts) I then built up 5, 10, 20, brick heights following the curve until it meets its neighbor.
Pink Fractal Tree
This picture was taken on the final day of BayLUG‘s exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA (January 9, 2011) and is a part of a set of photos taken on the last day and during teardown.

Wrapping up the Palo Alto museum show

Yesterday was the last day of the BayLUG/BayLTC show at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto for another year. We had hundreds of people come through to admire the exhibit including a few friends of mine.

BayLUG/BayLTC Group Photo

The show is called “Living LEGO-cy” and this was the 7th time we’ve had it. For the first 5 years it was free, but then in 2008-9 the crowds were totally beyond our ability to manage, and it taxed the museum’s and our ability to handle, without any benefit to either institution. So we started charging $2 per person last year, enabling BayLUG to provide a loan to support the startup of Bricks by the Bay’s first convention. This year we kept it the same, though BBTB no longer needs the financial support, and raised a tidy sum for both the museum and the club (who split the income 50/50).

Click the photo above to see all my pictures from the event, or you can view a slide show of the images. See also the opening weekend post I made last month.

As in previous years, we filled the room with LEGO. In the center was a 12′ by 25′ train layout, and all along the sides of the room we had various miscellaneous LEGO exhibits on all types of themes. A few of us had some space to sell LEGO and LEGO-related accessories – I got rid of a bunch of sorting containers I no longer use (tackle boxes and stackable containers) and some bags of parts that I didn’t need; others were selling whole sets and minifigs and other small items. We also used this as an opportunity to solicit for new club members, which we had several of, and to distribute flyers for Bricks by the Bay 2011, and lots of people said they would be there. If you missed out on this exhibit, a similar one will form a centerpiece for the Bricks by the Bay exhibit hall. Hope to see you there!

MoAH 2010 Opening Weekend

This past weekend was the opening for the annual “Living LEGO-cy” museum display by BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) over the holiday season at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA. The show runs through January 9, 2010 and is open Fridays through Sundays except holidays.

MoAH 2010 Opening Weekend

Click the picture for all the photos or view them as a slide show.