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Lego printer
- maushu 16y agoWhy all that circuits? Couldn't he have used mindstorms?
- alttab 16y agoYou build one with Mindstorms then. He had to write the Mac OSX driver for it too. Awesome.
- Sukotto 16y agoPresumably for the same reason that some people cook pancakes from scratch instead of buying a mix. It's more fun for them.
- cmelbye 16y agoI don't think Mindstorms would allow him to write a printer driver to control the motors.
- ck2 16y agoHP needs to make a see-through printer with little animated characters like that for kids.
- chaosmachine 16y agoThe minifigs are a great touch. No lego project is truly complete without them.
- soyelmango 16y agoLego camera, lego router, Google's lego RAID, now a lego printer... no wonder that it's the best toy ever invented.
- Bjoern 16y agoThis is just too awesome. Makes me jealous as all my lego went to my cousins many years ago. :( Anyone a good idea where you can get cheap lego stuff? (maybe china @ bulk order?)
- ramidarigaz 16y agoYou can get some pretty good deals on ebay.
- Nekojoe 16y agoYou can generally get cheap buckets of Lego at people's yard sales, eBay, etc... The good thing about Lego is that it ages well, The bricks don't become obsolete. For more specific parts you could try BrickLink - http://www.bricklink.com/ http://www.bricklink.com/
- Tuna-Fish 16y agoFrom Lego. For generic blocks, you cannot really beat their "brick buckets" -- the deluxe version (http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=6177&cn=227&d=304 http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=6177&cn=2...) has 650 blocks for 30€. From the supermarket, you can hardly get a 50-brick model for those 30€.
- eru 16y agoYou can get used Lego pieces on eBay for cheap. Just put them in a sack (e.g. pillow cover) and wash them in your washing machine, when you get them.
- bendtheblock 16y agoThis isn't really an answer to your question, but my co-founder's brother works as a designer at Lego HQ in Denmark, where they have a huge warehouse filled with every block/piece/component in every colour available... That's what he used to make lego versions of us, which we've used on our website ( http://wemakewebsites.info/about http://wemakewebsites.info/about ). I'm sure you can get a lot of stuff on mail order.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoGod, a warehouse full of lego. That's what heaven is like.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoI had assumed the link would be about a 3D printer that cranks out lego pieces. This is way, way more awesome.
- steveklabnik 16y agoYou can print out lego pieces on a Makerbot pretty easily. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:591 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:591
- mbreese 16y agoAnd here, I was assuming it was a 3D printer that made objects with Legos. Either way though, it was great.
- JeanPierre 16y agoWell, why not combine a 3D printer AND lego? Since I've got a long summer, I'm now really tempted to make a RepRap (http://reprap.org/ http://reprap.org/) with lego like this. Imagine how cool it would be to show that to kids: A lego-robot making lego!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hugh3 16y agoI've thought about a Lego-building robot made of Lego before, but mostly in the context of an illustration of why atomic assembly by nanobots is probably impossible. I'm thinking specifically of the "sticky fingers" problem, which says that if something binds strongly enough to an atom to "pick it up" then it's going to be very difficult to get it to "drop" it again. I imagine you'd have the same problem with Lego... although at least with Lego you can usually pick a block up by its sides, which you can't do with atoms.
- eru 16y ago> I've thought about a Lego-building robot made of Lego before, but mostly in the context of an illustration of why atomic assembly by nanobots is probably impossible. Bacteria are proof that nano-assembly is possible, if you define assembly broadly enough.
- ivorjawa 16y agoMore of a plotter than a printer, really. Well, it could be, with the correct software.
- zwieback 16y agoAs a HP printer engineer I heartily endorse this project!
- jonah 16y agoRad! Now he needs to do a color version. Remember pen plotters? They had a carousel of different colored markers and it'd draw (raster or vector) with one color and then pickup a different color and output that color. Loved watching those things work.
- th 16y agoThis is pretty cool. I tried to do something similar in high school with some friends. We tried to make a lego robot that would draw like a hand does (not like a line printer). The difference in velocity between a drawing and raised marker created too much error for our robot, but we probably could have fixed this if we had spent more time tweaking variables.
- werrett 16y agoHorseattack's camera work and soundtrack was nearly as kick-arse as the printer / driver combo. Edit: The track is a remix of a Christopher & Raphael Just's Popper by Shinichi Osawa. The track is on Shinichi Osawa's Teppan-Yaki: A Collection Of Remixes album. Unfortunately it isn't available in the Australian iTune's store. :(
- kqr2 16y agoAs mentioned in his notes, there was actually a lego plotter kit, although he didn't base his project on that. http://guide.lugnet.com/set/1092 http://guide.lugnet.com/set/1092