miguev

I found something weird today: many stores in Switzerland have it for around €170 but Toys'R'us still has it for €220, significantly more expensive than the Volvo Loader (42030). I guess it's still a highly demanded set so they're trying to be the last ones to lower the price?

Totally with you on that SBrick is not for fast vehicles, I've had enough pain with mine to start considering getting a complete Lego RC buggy, in the hope that steering has much less latency. I think another good use case for SBricks is when IR receivers are too big or will make the model look odd.

Great truck nonetheless, pretty impressive for a leisure build. I was frankly hoping for a better bodywork and more slow-mo action shots, you've set the bar pretty high in previous works

Impressive! Makes me feel like I can't park a car anymore, and I did park in reeeeally tight places back in the old days.

Stunning functions! I wish you'd publish instructions, could learn so much from this truck

Holy cow! Never seen such an amazing Baja Truck, and I did look closely at every one I could find.

I'm speechless, your robot plays guitar so much better than I ever managed! Seriously, I can't for the life of me do that with the right hand.

Thank you for one more nice comment, appreciate it! I find it hard to feel proud of my work when I start looking at the works ( of others, specially in this case since rm8 and Sariel are doing the same! Anyway, I won't drop the project, I posted a teaser and now I own it to you all. Video will take some weeks at least, I think. Filming near home is just impossible, so I'll take the truck to work and try to film it during lunch break with help from the 2nd SBrick's owner, so he'll have some fan too. Meanwhile, I might be able to put together another teaser trailer with what I've filmed at home so far.

Oh, just found you can pre-order for SFr. 229 in Switzerland. Only one shop, and they're using one of the "CONFIDENTIAL" photos of the box

I had never heard of silicon spray until you used it for your Mercedes C... would this one work?

Yeah, the A pillars spoil the whole thing. I'm still trying to do better but can't find a way with steering links, they're too short or too long, and all my flex axles are too long. Besides, I do want the roof to be really sturdy, the whole truck is stored upside down on its roof, to avoid compressing shocks for a long time. I just tried removing one of the 20:12 with a 16:16 so there is not that much reduction any more... it's scary! Even the slowest it can drive is a bit too fast for the steering latency, plus the climbing power it had seems to be gone (indoor test only so far). Still, I think I'll leave like this if it can still drive through bumps, it'll be even harder to drive and film but if I do manage to film something it's gonna look more impressive. Thanks for the suggestion

Can't wait to see it!

Yeah, I think the 3 stages of the RC system, plus the fact that you can feel the lever in our finger/s, help a lot. Why remove the caster angle entirely? I already have a reinforcement here, it's a thin 5L liftarm betwen the A arms, look for the red 2L axles in the arms. It's weird, but it works. Yes, batteries being lighter and smaller are one of the reasons to use them, it allowed me to build 2 seats in this truck, both suitable for Technic minifigs. It wasn't like I needed that, sure I could have filled the cabin with 2 lipos, but as I noted they're expensive and may shut down under stress. There are also 600 mAh batteries, but I've read too many horror stories of such batteries being fakes: they're labeled as 600 mAh but in fact are 200 mAh. Besides, I couldn't find them anywhere where I live. A green apple from 2115!

Thank you so much for your kind comments! I've been rather frustrated by my filming attempts. The truck looks decent, but drives terribly, it drives me mad! I don't have large scale locations near home, and so far don't see a chance to go anywhere with it. It's so hard to drive I can't even film what I want by placing the camera on the ground and driving near it, the truck always goes in a random trajectory quite different than intended. I may have better luck taking the truck to work and asking colleagues to drive it while I chase it with the camera I have a question for those of you who have the full as well as the SBrick, and have tried driving fast vehicles with both: should I just buy a full RC set (8376, 8475, 8366) for better driving experience? (re. steering latency).

Hello! I’m not particularly proud of this Technic horror I’ve created, but I’d like to share it with you rather than keep it to myself, possibly forever. Shortly after I learned about (and supported) SBrick and MiniZip in KickStarter, I started dreaming of building powerful, compact MOCs using a new combo: PP3 NiMh battery + MiniZip + SBrick + 5292 RC Buggy Motor. This is my first attempt at it, now that Android SBrick app (1.3+) is finally usable Functions Drive: 2x 5292 RC Buggy Motor, each connected to a separate SBrick, each powered by a separate PP3 NiMh 250 mAh battery using MiniZip. Steering: PF Servo. Front suspension: independent, soft, long travel, with “fake” positive caster Rear suspension: solid axle, dragged (didn’t figure out how to do four-link) 4x Lego LED Still haven’t applied myself to learning proper bodywork, so designing my own was out of the question. I went for an easy, fairly plain one. No openable doors, bonnet or anything. I worked with these two photos and scaled for 62.4mm tires. Full size (> 1024px): 1, 2. Photos were made really quick, during a baby siesta (indoor) and in short incursions (outdoors) no more than 20 meters from home. For now, I can only dream of having more time and freedom for this :D v0.99 without stickers: v1.0 with stickers based on video: Old school navigator refused to deal with GPS and computers, wanted just a compass (70001pb02) and a map with an X that marks the spot. Smart dude, run off with the loot. Very short of creativity and sleep, the only alternative I could think of to get rid of the demonic Monster logo and brand was a rather lame one: Music Energy. Example diff: I asked friends to vote in G+ and 3 out of 4 prefer Music, but the one who prefers Monster is my the only one into LEGO. I’m divided, will probably print them and try them on, but still not sure which ones to use for filming. I started with 1 battery, 1 SBrick, 2 motors. It seemed to run well. Adding an extra battery and Sbrick seems to make it run even stronger / faster, although SBrick developer Zsolt Majoros said it shouldn’t matter. The real reason I added the extra SBrick is that “2 ports 1 function” only works in Android app when those 2 ports are on separate SBricks. You may ask why use PP3 batteries instead of the acclaimed LiPo batteries… mainly because they are expensive, and a bit of a lottery with their thermal protection. MiniZip + PP3 NiMh 250 mAh wasn’t a whole lot cheaper, but the combo is certainly more compact, half the weight and doesn’t have any thermal protection. SBricks can draw as much current as the motors want, with just a small risk of overheating and possibly catching on fire… ah well, what could possibly go wrong? I haven’t actually managed to make the batteries warm up, they get warmer when charging. One likely reason for not achieving hotness is short life, according to this battery life calculator, they’d last 3.5 minutes at 3 A, 10 minutes at 1 A, 20 minutes at 500 mA. Can someone make a better-informed / estimation of a more realistic battery life? But there are more and worse problems, for which I sure can do with your advice! Caster angle is fake, isn’t? I mean, I just shifted the upper A arms a half stud backwards, but both A arms still move vertically. I think this is why big bumps will throw the truck’s front up rather than only the front wheel/s going up. When hitting a big bump with a front wheel, the wheel will thrust up and with it the whole car will roll to the opposite side. This results in a raised rear wheel taking all torque to just spin in the air, so the car stops until the raised wheel hits the ground again. Shifting the upper A arms a half stud backwards messed with the steering geometry, so now there’s a not-so-slight bump steering. I think this, combined with the twisting effect on the solid axle, is what’s causing the truck to steer to the left when accelerating. Too bad. Motors are hard coupled on their fast output and then geared down 20:12 twice, not including the 20-tooth to differential connection. Maybe I could / should gear down 20:12 only once, haven’t had a chance to try yet. I suppose integrating the motors in the rear axle and connecting wheels directly to them would help with the last couple of problems, but couldn’t figure out how to fit that in this body just yet. I’m also concerned that if one battery drains faster, the motor (no longer) powered by it will get damaged. With each rear wheel directly on one motor, that would result in the truck going in circles, but motors wouldn’t get damaged. How bad is this? Steering with SBrick (v1.3) as a significant latency, in the time it takes from the moment I slide my finger to a side (much or little) to the moment when the PF Servo starts moving, the truck is already going the wrong way. It’s really hard to drive straight. rm8, what’s your experience regarding this latency with your Double Trouble? If anyone has not seen rm8’s Double Trouble, I’ll put it as “my dream, properly done” Thank you for reading. If you were looking for a video... EDIT(25.05.2015): slightly better pics. EDIT(26.09.2015): I’m now a little more proud of my creation, at least the suspension seems right to me: it’s long travel and soft enough to reacts promptly to bumps, but the car doesn’t sink too much on it. I dare say it works better than most others, probably because it’s much harder to this the a bigger scale most others have been working with. The car is still not really fast, so I didn’t bother measuring its speed. I did try putting less reduction in the drivetrain, but that only resulted in lower speed due to lower torque, so I reverted back to my original setup. It’s still fast enough to be impossible to drive well, specially with the terrible latency in the SBrick. Latency is not a problem with the port tester, so it doesn’t look like a hardware limitation. Anyway, it’s fast enough to be fun. Thanks to Sir Wolf’s help and support, we finally have a somewhat decent video. Enjoy! :) And we learned many things the hard way: by failing. Fake caster angle is not good, you need real caster for off-road racing. I took the idea from someone’s supercar project here (sorry, couldn’t find it again) to displace the upper suspension arm by ½ stud backwards from the lower arm (see belly shot above). That gives you quite a bit of caster angle on the wheel (or snowmobile skies) but it does not help reacting promptly to the most serious bumps. It also screws the geometry in that the gear rack should ideally be ¼ stud backwards, but it’s either 0, ½ or 1. This results in notorious bump steering: front wheels are toes out when suspension is fully extended, and toes in when fully compressed. When this adds to the torsion exerted by the powerful motors on the live axle (see in the video how left front wheel jumps up when car starts). All in all: bad Idea. Portal hubs from 8070 are not good for off-road racing, I should have used the ones from the snowmobile 42021 (2015). They are also too expensive to go on dirt with them, so I didn’t. Differential slows down or even stops the car when one rear wheel take off. I knew this was a problem with crawlers, but never imagined how bad it’d be on a trophy truck. Damn it, I’ll never do this again. Just use one motor per wheel, and accept that if one motor runs out of battery or losses signal, you might take a sharp turn or find yourself driving in circles for a little, depending how the front wheels cope with the imbalance. MiniZip are great to get “buggy-motor-grade” power in a smaller size than LiPo batteries. PPA 9V batteries can fit a width of 3 studs, so a 5x11 panel makes for a perfect home. However, MiniZip’s lack of power switch in makes it a complete hassle to replace batteries. Should keep them very easily accessible.

+1 on using Bricklink. I realize now how "lucky" I was, when I got 10 of them from bricksy ... by mistake! For "only" €4.14 each.

Priceless! I wish you'd mounted a tiny camera between the eyes. And yes, please, make it jump / quickly shift forward in the next version

Something like that happened to me, it wasn't my first Bricklink order but still a pretty big WTF moment when I see a Friends box where I expected EV3 batteries...

Holy cow I really can't wait! I've been working on a very similar project for the last ~9 weeks, and your specs tell me this is gonna be... what I wanted to do, damn well done.

Can't wait to see it running! I've been working on something similar but I'm afraid it grew too heavy to drift or jump and it seems impossible to drive straight, even with SBrick. Yours is looking so good and promising, I'm not feeling like filming mine as much as before. Anyway, I'll try put my sh*t together, some day. Meanwhile I really can't wait to see your truck in action

Great helicopter, I love the EC-135 and dream of building one some day, but will certainly not be anywhere near your level of sophistication. The interiors are spectacular!

Not only title and tags, the link is also broken! Correct one is http://rebrickable.com/blog/2015/05/interview-with-madoca

:laugh: :laugh_hard: :iamded_lol: :roflmao: :thumbup:

Great work there with the bodywork! I was hoping to see it "in action" outdoors though

Real cool! And thanks a lot for the explanatory video, it helps understand so many details, about the car as well as the filming