Bricks on a beautiful weekend

Am I that crazy to do 2 ..YES 2 LEGO events on the same weekend?
The Camp Combe LEGO Carnival on Saturday, April 25th and Lyndhurst LEGO Fun for the entire weekend. What a rush!

At The carnival I had robots, some city and minifigure stuff and a bunch of interactive displays. I had my Final Fantasy chicken walker series there as my true originals and only one of my dragons, zero. I had a usual table full of bionicle stuff, mostly old ones and even had a few rahkshi out! Bohrok, Muaka and Kane-ra were there along with the Droid developer kit - too bad batteries fried my microscout though. I brought out the black creations car and the white convertible only to be topped off with the big Ferrari GTB 599. The Cafe corner and market street were tabled with a circle of train track which had the BSNF Locomotive pulling a few cars. Inside was the 'centerpiece' ferris wheel, which, without a little fiddling with, would get stuck.
The big hits were the rhotuka spinners, BT RC robots and free play areas. Tops using the pull back motors were great, but i dont get how they were so complex for the kids. I had some gold brick to play with (much to my chagrin) but the kids made some fun stuff out of that. There was a great chunk of knights kingdom figure parts and just loose brick from everything.
Everything got mixed up so i really have to sort now!

Lyndhurst had my usuals for Lyndhurst. Bionicle table, this time with the six glatorians, Loci, my two battle angels, the bounty hunter and kikanlhikanalo. I tried pulling out Infinitus, but i think i'm just going to have to rebuild it. I brought out some starwars stuff, everyone loves the Hoth scene. The UCS Naboo starfighter just really gleamed in the sun.
My GBC was really something else this year, and i get better at it everytime i have a run at it. I used philo's instructions for a Jigsaw with a Star justice theme and a generic dumper module. I also made a conveyor belt with a Space Skulls color scheme, but the theming never really got off, i was just happy it worked. My coup de gras was this dozer module, it had a construction theme and used an inverted track to bring the balls up and then drop them to a little off ramp towards the front, minifigs were used structurally to keep balls from popping out. It was great and really really reliable. Lastly, theres always one that doesnt work, a Mars Mission base themed giant tower. It was truly ambitious, the major problem was that the balls would stay on the chain even after they flipped upside down. I tried using a 2x3 plate in between to help the balls jump off, but they'd still stay or the 2x3 plate would come off at the bottom of the conveyor. I did manage a clever mechanism to help catch the balls though. Maybe next year i can make it bigger still and make it more reliable.
On sunday i brought my original chicken walkers since i think they were cool.

As usual Arthurs sculpted buildings were great, the Naboo Castle Really stood out in my mind, since it was his only non real building. Also the LeGo-Bots lady was there with some awesome RC robots and demonstrations, can you believe she told me she bought 7 (YES 7) Black NXTs!

Well till next time

Angels

One of the kids on my FLL team decided it'd be a cool idea to replicate on of my favorite MOCS in blue - then well i couldnt resist to make it in red.

The yellow one is the original Battle Angel, first introduced in a BZPower BBC Contest. And the red and blue are the new ones

They all have a similar construction, minor differences in the chest area and also the hair.

I love how the red one really feels like one of the Ferrari models, and for once a blue model actually looks female. And i'm loving this color scheme, a hint of filipino in it. Gallery to come soon.

New Projects

I wonder why i even start new projects when some of the older ones havnt even really gotten that much feet off the ground. 

anyway, as a compliment to the 4 legged monstrosity i've been working on.  (Which i havent blogged about) i'm working on a biped with similar leg design but this time, instead of worm gearing the knee joints, i'm using the new fangled linear actuators at the rear of the leg.  

I havent seen anyone do it yet, and by the looks of my initial sketches and moc ups it looks to be huge.   I've always wanted to have as much of the controls within the body as possible and with the linear actuators its much easier to do so.  Could i be ambitious enough to make it with the Power Functions? now only if there was a way to get the ankle controls all the way back up to the main body.  So we'll see how it works. 

Recap and the coming season

The summer was full of NXT goodness, all sorts of ideas we had this time 

from wearable armor to booby traps, remote controls and a huge F'n Y made out of LEGO. 

The ideas were pretty grand, with just 3 real days to build the project i had to come up with new and exciting stuff, my favorite was the remote controls though.   i had 20 robots running in 10 pairs and only one died because of the battery.  The controller itself was pretty dang durable if i say so myself . 

A nice looking dual forward/back stick made out of the retail kit and the resource kit and program to boot.  This badboy is on its way to being published and its been tried and true. 

It was a great event to get the whole camp involved as well, we were all excited about it.  In the end i modified it so that i had the touch sensors by the thumbs, they felt a little more like fighter jets then. 

The robots themselves were modified versions of the retail tribot with a simplified claw attachment. As it was just strong enough to hold the ball  it made it hard to do anything with it.  It would work really well autonomosly, but not with the controller.  It was nice to see.

This coming season i'm looking to use the task bot built in the LEGO Engineering curriculum, i hope it turns out well, looks like you can do a lot of stuff with it but eventually i'll have my own robot.  Still, cant go wrong with what's been tried and true as well as supported. 

Y signs up

Some work at the YMCA
More to come later

AS-ST's!

as promised, i've got some pix..wish they were higher quality but hey ..
thanks to Daniele Benedettelli for the work and inspiration.


there were 5 in this picture and a sixth being built since one of the kids had to catch up ..he missed a class. I was able to download the pre-written program into all of them, and we had a great time watching them walk around. After all that, i tried getting the kids to write the program using NXT-G, man this was tough. It was hard to get the 'magic built in limit switch' working right. The theory was there, but i hadnt had enough time to test it before giving it to the students. It should've been easier than what it was, but you can definitely see the speed limitations of NXT G under the speed of NXC.

heres some more small thumbnails of the robots, which all got some custom treatment from each kid.




















As you can see, i've got some imaginative kids. Most had enough to build the full model, but some had the retail kit limitation. Others had the educational kit and the resource kit together so all their beams were grey instead of white. what a great project.

Is this for real?

'shelf user dsvelte recently uploaded this badboy. Set 10188, and i definitely have room for this one. but again, i'm afraid the pricetag might border on another vacation.