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The Free Universal Construction Kit
- culi 6mo agoThat's an awesome project. I'm sure there are many kids that have been gifted LEGO knockoffs that are not compatible with legos from adults that didn't know any better. A similar "interop" project for those would be great
- bombcar 6mo agoAlmost all (back then, I hear the clone quality is much higher now) were "compatible" but had little to no clutch power, a wall built with some of them would inevitably break at the clone bricks.
- onemoresoop 6mo agoCrappy tolerance in the clone parts. I hear the clones got much better now.
- culi 6mo agoI don't mean lego knockoffs. I mean legal alternatives to lego. Yes I've heard modern Lepin often exceeds real LEGO in quality
- pipeline_peak 6mo agoWhen I was a kid I used to rate my uncles and aunts based off who got me Legos or Megablocks. Idk how I’d feel if they got me this.
- andai 6mo agoI was so confused recently, when I bought a toy car kit from some German brand which cost 25 euro and came with the pieces all joined together straight from the injection mold, so you had to twist them off one by one, and then the little injection spikes stabbed your fingers while you worked. Bought an almost equivalent set from Lego (stab-free!) for 9 euro. How does that pricing make sense haha
- sdwr 6mo agoEconomy of scale, Lego can invest the billions(?) in machines and molds that don't leave connection points (?), partially by reusing pieces between sets.
- orsorna 6mo agoWith such kits you are generally supposed to remove the parts from the runners with nippers and then sand those nubs down.
- analog8374 6mo ago[flagged]
- flobosg 6mo ago(2012)
- extraduder_ire 6mo agoFUCK yeah.
- DatumPlus 6mo ago[dead]
- cortesoft 6mo agoNo Construx? I built everything out of those as a kid.
- wisemanwillhear 6mo agoDitto. My kids are still pretty young, and my old Construx are one of the favorite building toys.
- fwipsy 6mo agoNeat idea, but as an adult who builds little machines out of Lego Technic for fun sometimes, the adapter selection seems very limited. In order to make this idea "practical" you would need adapters with a variety of sizes, shapes, and orientations. I guess I'm not the target audience - I can definitely see this being cool for children.
- mathgeek 6mo agoThat’s the joy of 3d printing. You can adapt these to any adapter if you need it.
- idiotsecant 6mo agoI feel like the only way to summon the corporate lawyers faster would be to put a Mickey mouse on the box.
- jadamson 6mo agoIf you go to the homepage (or look at the banner) the project is shut down since 2015. https://fffff.at/rip/ https://fffff.at/rip/
- Rygian 6mo agoMickey mouse is in the public domain, at last!
- LPisGood 6mo agoI think they would have a very strong case that using the mouse on a product is likely to confuse consumers about the origin of the product and therefore infringe on their trademark.
- wavemode 6mo agoNah, Disney seems to be genuinely letting it go. Amazon and other sites are flooded with Steamboat Willie merchandise at this point. In fact I play cornhole competitively, and last year I picked up a set of Steamboat Willie themed bags: https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-color-drip-edition-acl-pro-2026-bags-multiple-bag-series-set-of-4-bags https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-colo...
- srean 6mo agoAny zometool aficionados here https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/zometool.html https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/zometool.html
- Duanemclemore 6mo agoZometool rules! I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful. In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor. The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.
- srean 6mo agoFantastic ! Would love to read more about your experiences.
- analog8374 6mo agoyeah I dig it a fair bit. It's good for making jigs for carpenting geometric stuff. Those funny angles.
- adkaplan 6mo agoThis kit is how I discovered zometool ten years ago and still find it fascinating. Its amazing! Check out vZome and its associated discord. FOSS virtualzome builder and symmetry study tool.
- srean 6mo agoThanks a bunch. I did not know about vZome. Thanks for the introduction.
- nakedneuron 6mo ago
- datawars 6mo agoVery cool. Do two copyright infringements (one on each side of the adapter) cancel each other out? I really like it!
- croes 6mo agoAt least Lego‘s patent on the bricks expired. You can’t make mini figures but bricks shouldn’t be a problem
- sixtyj 6mo agoWell done indeed I hope that Lego (not lawyers ofc) would appreciate such creativity approach and hire creators. (E.g. similar to acquihire of OpenClaw creator by OpenAI.) How many of us do think this way? I am always jealous (in good way) when I see similar projects.
- stackghost 6mo agoIndeed Amazon is chock full of shitty Chinese Lego ripoffs. The bricks do indeed fit together but the quality is abysmal.
- Rexxar 6mo agoThere is some interoperability provision to patents and copyright in European union if I remember correctly but I don't know how broad they are and if they apply to this.
- delichon 6mo agoThese kits can have extraordinary longevity. I was playing with Lincoln Logs in 1967. Turns out they got started in 1918. Lego bricks have been around since 1945. The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
- reaperducer 6mo agoDon't forget Erector Sets. I spend untold hours failing to build a cable tramway between my mother's dresser and bed. But at least now I'm an expert at pylon design!
- lostlogin 6mo ago> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large. I wish Meccano would get its shit together. I can’t see anything I want on their limited site and there is so much cool stuff that could be made. https://www.meccano.com/ https://www.meccano.com/
- touggourt 6mo agoYou may found them on the Eitech website. It is a german compatible brand. https://www.eitech.de/en https://www.eitech.de/en
- rapnie 6mo agoIt is a really nice concept. I had never heard of it. But then as GenX at young age I played with Fishertechnik [0] more than with Lego. Around since 1966 [1]. [0] https://www.fischertechnik.de/en https://www.fischertechnik.de/en [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik
- aidenn0 6mo agoConstrux is what I played with. It was only sold for a few years.
- 6mo ago
- jojomodding 6mo agoTell your kids about FUCK, the most fun way to play with them bricks...
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- gblargg 6mo agoDo you mean leaving them on a hard floor so a parent can injure their heel stepping on one at night?
- kmoser 6mo agoSpecial high intensity training!
- nakedneuron 6mo agoSHIT.. I figured that one..
- amysox 6mo agoI was going to say something about the choice of acronym for the project, but, well, a couple people figured it out. :D
- lioeters 6mo ago> Note: all units are in inches. Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
- qwerpy 6mo agoIs this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units could be light-years for all it matters.
- reaperducer 6mo agoThere's something about the internet that makes people want to moan in public about nothing. Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units. Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.
- vscode-rest 6mo agoEvery post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about it. There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)
- genewitch 6mo agoup until very recently, the only units that made it even remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon." Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth". I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits! is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout. I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day. the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc. So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.
- tanvach 6mo agoSuper cool, lock-in is very real. We are overflowing with Duplo and Lego sets because I just don't want to deal with another system. There are, of course, other models on Thingiverse, Printables, etc., but knowing these are properly designed to fit and work is a huge plus. Cudos to the team!
- tripdout 6mo agoWow, Tinkertoys, I still remember how the wood smelled and the big drum it came in.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoCore childhood memory reignited.
- lucb1e 6mo agoIn case the authors are here, the first sentence contains the bytes e2 80 94 which would be UTF-8 for an em dash, but it has been reinterpreted as 3 bytes using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout and shown on the page as —. Further down, there's a lot of similar errors such as a single right quote (U+2019) in K'nex. Firefox seems to have first removed their encoding configuration menu in version 89, then introduced a new button in version 91, and that one is disabled now as well so there's no fixing this user-side it seems :/ Edit: ah the page is from 2012-03-19, from the <meta property="article:published_time"> tag
- londons_explore 6mo agoThis is probably the case of a bodged migration from one CMS to another. My blog suffered the same, and going through loads of old pages to check and fix them just isn't worth the effort.
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo agoThe archived version from 2012 is showing the characters correct. So probably some migration like you said. https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/... The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to the front page. https://fffff.at/ https://fffff.at/ Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird characters show up. But which was showing the characters the way it should on August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down. https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/ Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of the site and in the process of doing so things got a little screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
- flashdesk 6mo agoYeah this really looks like an encoding issue during migration. I've run into similar problems when moving old content between systems, especially with MySQL and mixed encodings. It can get messy surprisingly quickly.
- shepherdjerred 6mo agoI'm disappointed this wasn't a joke about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_property
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- AstroJetson 6mo agoI’m disappointed that VEX IQ didn’t make the list of connections. For a System they have a lot of well thought out parts, they need help on the decoration side and smaller gear patterns.
- DatumPlus 6mo ago[dead]
- skyberrys 6mo agoThe idea send wild, it reminds me of the katamari video game where you roll up assorted stuff.
- hjkl0 6mo agoThis thing is from 2012. It's a set of printable models for toy parts that allow interconnecting with a bunch of different construction toys, like Lego and K'nex. I remember thinking this was pretty subversive and cool back then. My own experience in 3D printing since that time has taught me that there is no way that these parts can ever be printed accurately enough to actually work. It didn't get much traction on the Thingiverse files either.
- IanCal 6mo agoYou can definitely print Lego pieces that work, I’ve got some.
- dackdel 6mo agoI did not expect to wake up to se fffffat on hn. God i miss them all so much.
- DatumPlus 6mo ago[dead]
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