bartneck

The 28" x 28" poster is currently $35.24 (25% off everything today). 21" x 28" is $22.49. I am not logged in and can still see all the prices. Maybe try this URL: https://society6.com/product/the-unofficial-brick-color-guide_print?sku=s6-8308433p4a1v2

Dear Lug 4/2 AFOLs, Today I would like to share an experience with you that I had during and after the Christchurch Brick Show. As some of you already know, one of my exhibits was banned from the show by the Show/Lug Committee. I displayed the LEGO Ferrari F40 right next to its LEPIN copy. The models were accompanied with a poster explaining the lawsuit between LEGO and LEPIN. The reason for banning the exhibit was that it was against the rules. Reluctantly I took the exhibit down. This was the most unpleasant experience I ever had at a show and you might wonder why I email all of you about it. My intention is to prevent this to happen to any of you and to help the club to define clear guidelines that would prevent such situations in the future. Again, you may ask, why emailing this to everybody when this could be discussed with the committees. Well, I communicated with the club’s management extensively and eventually submitted an official complaint. I did not receive any response to my concerns and my complaint. To make things worse, the management of our club instructed our LEGO ambassador not to talk to me and not to provide essential information. Moreover, they also gave the same instruction to David Woodbridge, head of the Auckland LUG. At this point I felt rather isolated. A club is about sharing and communicating with fellow enthusiast. Isolating a member from this is certainly not in the spirit of the club. I did receive one response from LUG 4/2’s management and I will explain to you why this message is so significant. First, here is the message: The RLUG IP Guidelines is what I requested from our LEGO Ambassador and from David Woodbridge. Both of them and the LUG management withheld this document from me. Luckily, I was able to obtain a copy through another channel. This document defines how a show may use LEGO advertising material, such as their logo, to promote the show. It does say nothing about what may or may not be exhibited. LEGO’s Fair Play Policy, however, does give clear indications that copying one of their models is considered unfair. LEPIN is most likely violating their Fair Play Policy. Hence the lawsuit. But here comes the important difference. Reporting about LEPIN is not the same as copying a LEGO model. As a matter of fact, Brickset recently published a review of LEPIN’s Super Star Destroyer (https://brickset.com/article/29578/review-lepin-super-star-destroyer). Reporting about a crime does not make the reporter a villain nor the report a crime. Brickset has to follow the exact same rules and guidelines as a recognized fan media than we have as a recognized LEGO user group. I contacted the LEGO company to ask about their view on the issue and their clear message was that the LEGO group does not influence what may be exhibited at a fan run show. LEGO is not always happy about what is exhibited, such as the burning twin towers in New York, but they do not interfere. Let’s consider the case of Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist famous for his critical and controversial work. TLG initially declined a bulk order he made since it would exhibition would contravene “corporate policy”. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen later revised this decision and in January 2016 In LEGO dropped its restrictions on bulk orders, saying it would stop asking people why they wanted its bricks. Customers wanting to build public displays out of Lego bricks would now only have to make clear that the company does not endorse the project. Another claim made by the committee was that my exhibit would have triggered a report being send to the LEGO company. Owain Bunyan, a representative from LEGO New Zealand who attended the show told me that he is not aware of any such report. Jan Beyer, LEGO community manager, was also unaware of any such report. Showing two Ferrari F40, one from LEGO and one from LEPIN, and challenging the community to guess which one is which is a playful and engaging method of stimulating a discussion. A discussion that we desperately need. The public and the AFOLs need to be informed about what they are buying and how they can tell original LEGO products apart from copies. The two Ferraris showed how difficult this has become. Section 3.c of the LUG 4/2 rules even stipulate the goal to “Assist in education of the community through participation in LUG4x2 events, related workshops and increasing the capabilities of the community”. The charitable status of our club is based on its educational mission. We have to provide education to the community, including how to tell original LEGO models apart from copies. In summary, it appears that the show/LUG committee was not aware of the rules or did not understand them correctly when they made their decision to ban my exhibit. This can be best described as negligent if not incompetent. What followed after the show is also highly problematic. Withholding information, ignoring complaints and instructing other club members not to talk to me is unprofessional. As a matter of fact, it gives me the impression that they had something to hide. What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future. First, the show needs to have clear guidelines about what is allowed at the show and what not. Do we allow the display of military equipment? Do we allow the depiction of violent scenes? (Both happened before). How do we deal with fake LEGO and non-LEGO products? Does everything at the show has to be 100% original LEGO? I hope that we have a chance to talk about this during our upcoming annual general meeting. A more detailed report on my experience is available on my website at: http://www.bartneck.de/2017/09/02/critical-lepin-exhibit-banned-from-lego-fan-show/

Play TicTacToe against this LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot. It uses three motors to drop its balls into the right field and a NXTCam to view the board. It then calculates the best move using a MiniMax Algorithm. All future moves are explored and rated according to their winning chances. An IR sensor detects your hand when you drop your ball. The robot is using red balls and the human player uses blue balls. The java code is available at Github and the building instructions are available for LEGO Digital Designer on my website show in the description. I used the MinuteBot baseplate, which is useful for building static Mindstorms models. I also used a LED lamp to provide consistent lighting that is powered through the USB port of the EV3. The position of the camera can be centered on the board using the wrench and through sliding along the axles. I hope you enjoy this robot. More information at http://www.bartneck.de/2017/07/17/tictactoe-playing-lego-mindstorms-robot-using-computer-vision/

LEGO’s turn table has considerable friction and rotating a model at an exhibition for a whole day would ruin it. A thrust ball bearing is necessary to decrease the friction. I previously 3D printed a large bearing for my Unikitty. For this year’s exhibition I needed a smaller thrust ball bearing so I designed a new medium sized ball bearing. It includes liftarms to hold a worm wheel which results in a rotation ratio of 1:78. The 3D model is available from my website. I hope it helps you for your MOCs.

I designed a Classic Castle & Game Of Thrones t-shirt and it is up for vote at Threadless. Please vote for it so that it becomes available for production.

The t-shirt is now available on Tee Fury (http://www.teefury.com/game-of-bricks). It looks like they still have to add their graphics, but it is there in principle. During the first week it is only 15$, after that it will go up to $20. Enjoy!

The guys over at Teefury intend to bring it to the market shortly. Well, they have not given me a date yet, but I will post it here as soon as I know.

The Complete Minifigure Catalog has finally become what it should have been from the start. A massive hardcover book with the best printing quality. I hope you enjoy this book!

You might have seen my other post on the exact LEGO color palette. Well, here is one of the reasons I got so interested in it. I created a T-Shirt Design and if you like it, please consider voting for it. https://cdn-media.threadless.com/submissions_wm/745710-77d7469c41bde8ad2b480199f9506c90.jpg

The LEGO color palette remains a mystery. Yes, there are many AFOLs who tried to identify all the colors and even TLG provided some information. The problem is that they all disagree with each other on the exact color definitions. I wrote a blog entry on my analysis. Have you found a precise definition of the LEGO color palette?

You might enjoy this mosaic: https://www.flickr.com/photos/106053817@N08/albums/72157645307879928

The Classic Castle LEGO Minifigure Catalog has just become available. It is available as a book or ebook. It contains all the Classic Castle Minifigure and no, it does not contain Nexo Knights. I does, however, included the Classic Castle heraldry and you might also enjoy the t-shirt.

They know about the books. I sent several to them. I also talked to DK in an attempt for collaboration, but they were not interested.

I have been working on LEGO related books for years and, fingers crossed, LEGO has not taken any legal action.

Hello, I would like to let you know that a dedicated Middle Earth LEGO Minifigure Catalog is now available. It has the best photographs of all the LOTR/Hobbit Minifigures in it. I hope you enjoy it.

Hello, I would like to let you know that a dedicated Middle Earth LEGO Minifigure Catalog is now available. It has the best photographs of all the LOTR/Hobbit Minifigures in it. I hope you enjoy it.

I am looking for help from a true LEGO Castle fan! I am intending to draw up the complete LEGO Castle Heraldry. There is already a nice introduction to LEGO Heraldry, but it is rather outdated by now. Do you have a complete overview of all the symbols/heraldry that the different fractions used over the years? My only idea on how to approach the problem would be to look at all the Minifigure Shields. Hopefully you have a better idea. Please let me know!

Today I would like to share my latest GBC module with you. It is a Quincunz, also known as a Galton Board. The balls are being transported up with a conveyer belt and a light sensor counts how many balls have passed. The balls then roll down the board and at each peg they can either bounce left or right. After the last peg the ball is caught in a repository. Once 100 balls made their way down, the gate opens and releases all the balls. Probably no GBC module could deal with 100 balls at a time, so I queued them up and deliver them one at a time. More information and the math behind it is available.

This is a very small, robust, reliable and easy to maintain buggy. It is ideal for letting your kids play with all day. The design goal was to make a robust car as small and simple as possible. This means most of all no suspension system since that would require the use of CV joints. They are known to break and while they work nicely in LEGO super cars that you carefully push around the floor, it does not work with kids trying to race and crash their RC cars. CV joints will break. Of course it is possible to create a LEGO RC car with suspension and even four wheel drive/steering, but then you end up with LEGO’s own RC Crawler. The goal was to keep it small, simple and robust. One of the problems I encountered when letting kids play with the RC cars all day is that the axles in the differential tend to slip and move out. I hence build a differential assembly in which the axles are completely locked in and cannot move. The worst thing that could still happen is that a wheel comes off which is easy to fix. The car uses only one L-Motor and is pretty fast for that. The turning radius is very tight and the car is just fun to drive. The differential makes it perfect to drive around tight corners. The heavy battery pack is right on top of the back axle, giving it the best friction. Well, it does not accelerate like an F1, but it might still make a small difference. Building instructions, LXF, and further information are available.

Thanks for all the positive feedback. I discovered the L motor in the extended LDD and changed the LFX file accordingly. should be fine now.

We just published an interesting article on whether LEGO products have become more violent. What do you think? Here is the summery of the article: "Although television, computer games and the Internet play an important role in the lives of children they still also play with physical toys, such as dolls, cars and LEGO bricks. The LEGO company has become the world’s largest toy manufacturer. Our study investigates if the LEGO company’s products have become more violent over time. First, we analyzed the frequency of weapon bricks in LEGO sets. Their use has significantly increased. Second, we empirically investigated the perceived violence in the LEGO product catalogs from the years 1978–2014. Our results show that the violence of the depicted products has increased significantly over time. The LEGO Company’s products are not as innocent as they used to be."

Great Ball Contraptions are fascinating and I designed two GBC modules that use LEGO slides for getting the balls up and down. The first uses a ball pump to push the balls up through the tower. The balls then roll down a double helix: The second modules uses the double helix for an Archimedes Screw. This is a very effective method of lifting balls up.

The tube sections are part nr 11267.

A Unikitty can never be big enough, pink enough, or sparkly enough. Well, here is my go at it. This MOC features a rotating head and sparkly eyes. A video is available . More information are available here.

I am happy to announce that the 2015 LEGO Minifigure Catalog is now available. In addition, the 5th edition of the Star Wars LEGO Minifigure Catalog and the 2nd edition of the 2014 Minifigure Catalog are ready. The updated catalogs have have many corrections and additions. Moreover, all books have a new QR code system that allows you to easily look up each figure online. Soon our app will also feature a QR code reader, so that you can directly lookup a figure into the app. Enjoy!