Heath Robinson in Real Lego (Part 1)

 Back in 2018 I'd created a digital Lego model "The Professor's Invention For Peeling Potatoes"  based on one of William Heath Robinson's designs.  You can see it here on the Lego Idea's site  and I've also blogged a little bit about it here Animating The Professor's Invention (Part 1) and here Animating the Professor's Invention (Part 2).  I was pleasantly surprised when I was contacted earlier this year by Heath Robinson Museum based in Pinner, West London asking if I could build the model so they could feature it as one of their exhibits!  I happily agreed to create the model out of real Lego, but I was then faced with the challenge of how I might actually do it!  A few trips to Bricklink found all the parts that I needed, but I knew that the actual build would be tricky as the digital models can be more "forgiving" when it comes to the placement of elements like the rubber bands.  Plus, as I discovered the rubber bands change the physical structure of the model quite a lot.  There were also a number of changes and adjustments that I needed to ensure that the Lego model actually worked!

The series of images below, show the progress of the model from the original illustration, through the digital designs and early physical models, to the final model.

Back To The Brick

Gosh, it's been a crazy time!  I've managed to sort a few things out so I could have a little more time to continue my adventures with digital Lego.  As a lot of my adventures happened on the daily commute to work, during the pandemic, it was hard to find the time to continue my explorations.  However as the situation improves I find that I now have a little more spare time.  

At the end of the summer, some of my previous work got as far as MIT!  You can read the paper here https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08477  - my reference is at the bottom of Page 4!

Leg - o - Letters Build Movie

I rendered this short movie out of Studio 2.0 to show the build process for creating smooth studless Leg-o-Letters examples

Studless Leg-o-Letters

I've continued to work on my Leg-o-Letters code.  I now wanted to create "smooth" tiled letters where the top surface was completely flat and studless.  This meant I would have to level the brick height to "fill in" the gaps up to a certain height.   I was also aware that as I was using random placement of bricks and plates, the the stability of the resulting structure was quite unreliable.  In an attempt to improve the stability I modified the code to create a base layer of generally lager plates, then to randomly fill on to the base plates, then level-up the letters to a given height, then add a layer of larger plates to create smooth, stud-less letters. 

In the image above you can see the plate layer (top left), the fill of random bricks and plates (top right), the levelling pass to bring all the spaces to same height (lower left) and the tile pass to add larger tiles to create a studless top layer (lower right).  As the placement of the bottom plate layer and top tile layer is random there is better change that the stability of each letter in the model will be improved.

Leg-o-leters - Code published on Github

My code for creating your own Lego letters is now on github it will allow you to create Lego models in the .ldr format from text.  You can find it here...https://github.com/pennyforge/leg-o-letters

Still Searching For Studs

I still wanted to be able to add tiles to the finished text - in early tests my code tiled both the "ground" and the characters - as a test I created an image based on a logo that might be familiar.

Ultimately though I simply wanted to be able to tile the individual characters.

Lego in Lockdown

So last week I offered to do a presentation to the London AFOLs group on Digital Lego.  As we're all in lockdown this meant the presentation would via Zoom.  This was both my first Zoom meeting and my first Lego presentation!

After the interview Matt Elder one of the AFOLs asked if I'd be happy to do the presentation again for his YouTube Channel over the Easter Weekend - understandably, as I didn't have much on, this seemed like a good idea.  Matt created a blog post on his site about the interview here...

https://www.mattelder.com/lego-videos/digital-virtual-lego-building-primer-masterclass-neil-marsden-pennyforge-interview

You can find a pdf of the original presentation here also and its on YouTube here