Details: Pete Strege recently uploaded new photos of his spectacular Green Gables Stadium. Sure, you've seen this before in our Brickworld 2014 coverage, and it also was a highlight of Brickworld 2013 - but it's enough of a stunner to deserve a post of its own. There are many details to love here - the 24-sided architecture covering a 30-inch square (4 of the big grey baseplates) steals your eye at first, but there's also the removable (and well-angled) dome roof, the large minifig heads wearing hats, the dark green lettering in the front, the stunning use of color (sand green, dark green, medium dark flesh, and dark orange cover most of the model), and even a full interior (customizable for a few different sports, although the hat outside makes me think of this as a baseball stadium).
Don't take my word for it - check out all 56 photos in the Flickr album, including pictures of the interior, work-in-progress pictures, and LEGO Digital Designer screenshots showing how the model was designed. The whole thing is beautiful, but I suspect we'll be studying that dome for years.
Details: Here's an interesting idea for making LEGO robots at events more interactive - giving people an NXT-enhanced helmet that can control a robot playing a soccer-style game. Third-party sensors (gyro and acceleration) are used to track head movements. Commands are derived from there and then sent (over bluetooth) to the robots on the field.
The most impressive part? This was all done in the graphical programming language that ships with the NXT - none of this was done with traditional text-based programming languages.
Details: Now that the soccer/football table idea has been done successfully a few times, it was time to spruce up the concept. Here, we have one that includes ball handling and a computerized scorekeeper. The Power Functions WeDo system was used to give the laptop access to two motors and a pair of motion sensors. Fuller documentation's at the links above.
By the way - are posts with videos (like this one) still loading alright for everyone? YouTube seems to have changed how they handle embedding, and we want to make sure we're not losing anyone by using the newer embed code.
Details: There are some things that we all know are possible, but that few of us have actually gone all-in on. For example, you probably could build a passable Mindstorms NXT soccer-playing robot - or a score-keeping robot, or a simple mechanism that returns a ball that's fallen off a court. Here, it's pushed over the top - a custom-built soccer competition table is automated with a ball-return and score counter, and manned by three additional NXT-based robots - an overhead skycam and two competing soccer players.
It also helps that the soccer players are actually pretty good. Third-party sensors are used to allow them to navigate to their side of the field (through RFID) and to seek out a blinking ball (through IR).
Details: Word on the street is that there is some sort of football tournament going on now. Oh, not that type of football? Oh well. This spectacular sculpture is roughly life-size and is spot-on. It was an attempt at reverse-engineering a similar model by the slightly more famous Nathan Sawaya. On a side note, this is exactly the sort of sculpture I recommend you start out with if you're interested in experimenting with LEGO sculptures - although the brown parts can be hard to come by, the quantity of parts used here is actually pretty reasonable. Nathan Sawaya's version only used about 500 pieces - well within reach even if you have a fairly small collection. The most challenging part of this sculpture is the laces - they're made out of Technic 1x2 bricks with jumper plates attached. You connect the studs directly into the side of the Technic bricks.
Details: Here's one last Olympic model for this year's games. While I had previously blogged the mascot/logo of the games in LEGO form, I haven't even mentioned the athletes. Apparently this whole juncture is some sort of athletic competition. This model, based on Polish skier Justyna Kowalczyk is a simply a fantastic miniland-scale figure. The Technic-scale skis (which also appeared in the 1993 "Ice Planet 2002" line) work beautifully here, as do the antennae as ski poles. The real coup, though, is how well the click hinges allow the figure to be posed. She actually looks like she's skiing downhill! While click-hinges are often dismissed as "juniorization" (something to make LEGO kits easier for very young children to assemble that doesn't add value to the creative building process) by long-time LEGO hobbyists (these hinges were new roughly 10 years ago), their ability to lock in place makes them perfect for creating sturdy angles. In this case, we see the click-hinges used for the legs and the older "finger" hinges used for the feet. The effect works perfectly here. It's a shame that we won't be seeing "finger" hinges manufactured again in the future - Steve Witt confirmed at BrickFair 2009 that they are permanently discontinued, and he cited quality control as the reason for change to the newer hinges. That is completely understandable - most of us who grew up in the 90's (when "finger" hinges were easy to come by) have seen a few break over the years. It's increasingly becoming clear now that adult resentment at their "juniorization" was misplaced - LEGO wasn't trying to make the part easier for children to use, and as we've seen with today's model, there are new things coming out of the adult LEGO fan community that couldn't have been built with the older hinges.
Details: Every once in a while, my putting off doing a post for a day pays off when somebody posts something amazing during the day and I get to share it right away. Such is the case today, with this spectacular foosball table. While the use of swords may be technically be "cheating" to fans of the sport, Wikipedia's entry on Foosball sure makes it look like we're allowed to have multiple players on the goalie row (and hey! I had no idea foosball was such a complicated topic, or that there were so many names for it!)
To make LEGO fans like myself happy, there are some great details and parts usages - note the "useless" handle element making it's appearance on all the rods (which are themselves an impressive collection of Technic axles and axle extenders, completely in black), the use of Knight's Kingdom head on one side of the table, and the colorful team choice - swashbuckling Pirates vs Castle Knights!
Details: Here is the baseball stadium Miller Park. The builder tried a few different versions of this model and is now preparing the one pictured here for the TrainTime train show on March 1st and 2nd, 2008. The show is free and open to the public if you'd like to see this model in person. Both the show and the original stadium are located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There's a ton of into on the various versions of this model at the site above.
Pete Strege recently uploaded new photos of his spectacular Green Gables Stadium. Sure, you've seen this before in our Brickworld 2014 coverage, and it also was a highlight of Brickworld 2013 - but it's enough of a stunner to deserve a post of its own. There are many details to love here - the 24-sided architecture covering a 30-inch square (4 of the big grey baseplates) steals your eye at first, but there's also the removable (and well-angled) dome roof, the large minifig heads wearing hats, the dark green lettering in the front, the stunning use of color (sand green, dark green, medium dark flesh, and dark orange cover most of the model), and even a full interior (customizable for a few different sports, although the hat outside makes me think of this as a baseball stadium).
