Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
Today, LEGO has announce a new Android App for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. Â If you have an Android based phone, you can use this to manipulate your LEGO robots using Bluetooth. Â I have a Motorola Droid, and I have two MINDSTORMS NXT sets, but have never built anything with them. Â I really should get around to doing something about that.
(About half the words in this post are trademarks of someone or other, but I don’t feel like inserting all of the ® and “TM” indicators….)
BayLUG had its September 2010 meeting on Saturday, September 18 at Johannes’s church in San Leandro, CA. Â The contest theme was “National Parks” and I put together a model for it in just a couple of hours before leaving home for the meeting. Â My model is a Glacier National Park tour bus. Â I’ll post more about that with better pictures soon, but you can see it in the photos of the meeting. Â Click the image to view the pictures or see them as a slideshow.
My BrickCon trip was great! I drove up from where I live in northern California (Mountain View) to Seattle, with stopovers in Portland each way. Here’s the story of my trip… Continue reading “BrickCon 2010 Trip Report”
I’m here in Seattle for BrickCon. I’ll post more about it soon, but for now, here’s my pictures:
The 2010 Vintage Vehicles & Family Festival was held in Palo Alto on July 25. BayLUG took part with a small booth featuring my downtown buildings, some models by teenage member Jack Marquez, and Paul Sinasohn putting together some LEGO kits. Our club was really overextended this day, as it was also the last day of our San Leandro Brick Show and the Buzz Lightyear event at the Hillsdale Shopping Center. This was the first time our club was involved in three separate events at the same time! (And I made it to all three – if you count the teardown, that is…)
Click the picture for the photos, or browse a slideshow.
On July 23-25, members of BayLUG volunteered to help LEGO Master Builder Steve Gerling and LEGO store employees, and thousands of kids, build an 8-foot tall statue of Buzz Lightyear, from Disney’s Toy Story movies.
The event was held at the Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo, CA, near the LEGO store. Kids built 8 by 16 stud "bricks" out of 2×4 and 2×8 bricks, which were then assembled into the large model corresponding to the 2×4 bricks in a smaller sample model. BayLUG members volunteered to assist with the project, making sure there were always enough bricks for the kids to build with.
I was there on Saturday all afternoon, and came back Sunday night to help with teardown, but they had already done most of it already by the time I got there, thanks to the help of all the kids. We weren’t paid for our help, but we were given discounts on LEGO which is just as good :-)
Click the image above, or here for a slideshow.
I’ve just submitted my registration fees for BrickCon, the LEGO convention in Seattle. It’s held the first weekend in October – starting September 30 and going through the weekend on October 3. I hope to see you there!
This was the opening weekend for the the Brick Show in San Leandro, CA at the Bay Area Family Church, organized by Johannes van Galen and featuring BayLUG/BayLTC. The show is ongoing through July 25 so come on out and check it out!
The show features a large train layout and various other displays in all themes of LEGO. Admission is $5 each for adults (age 16+) and $3 for kids ages 3-15. Kids under 3 are free.
I took a bunch of pictures around the display today. Click on the image to see them:
You can also view the pictures as a slide show on Flickr.
I just stumbled across a way to build a 7-way radial symmetry in LEGO.
A technique for building 7-way radial symmetry in LEGO. The blue 2×2 plates are connected to each other using plate hinges in a ring, and when I built that I noticed the ring looked like the right diameter to go around a 4×4 round piece. The hinges actually protrude a little into the center, but by sandwiching the two 4×4 rounds together and filling the space inside with a round 2×2 plate and seven (leaving one stud open) 1×1 round plates, you can make it all fit nicely. And since the 4×4 rounds and 2×2 round plate have axle holes, it can easily be connected to any Technic mechanism.
If you stick an axle in the middle it twirls like a top – it’s very well balanced.
LDraw code after the break:
Here are the pictures from the Bay Area LEGO Users Group & Train Club‘s exhibit at Maker Faire 2010 Bay Area in San Mateo, CA.
We had a 40′ by 50′ space just like last year, but this time we set aside about half of it as a play area for the little ones. We dumped out loose LEGO parts on the floor (including a DUPLO area for the really little ones) and spread them out on some tables as well, so that fairegoers could build whatever they wanted. We then had some tables set aside to display these MOCs (My Own Creations), and had volunteers who would take pictures of the models and put them up on a computer. I brought my video projector and we had a continuous slideshow running all weekend with pictures of these MOCs.
Besides the play area, we had the usual train layout, and a row of tables for other themes such as space and sculptures.
You can see all my BayLUG pictures from Maker Faire in the BayLUG at Maker Faire 2010 photoset (slideshow), or see Maker Faire 2010 for all my Maker Faire photos, including both LEGO and non-LEGO displays.