JopieK

I just finished the new issue of a monthly Dutch model railroad hobby magazine. Have you ever felt a H0 or N locomotive? They are way heavier than a LEGO train. Of course you can weigh it down, but that will also have other disadvantages including the wear on plastic parts. I even milled (uh actually a colleague in Engineering school) my own wheels, I can ask them to mill loads of wheels if I like. It does work, but it is not very reliable. Also I don't see the advantages, especially nowadays when DCC (e.g. Lenz) decoders are still very expensive but microcontrollers (I teach embedded systems engineering) are really cheap. You can easily fit in powered up with e.g. Raspberry Pi, Arduino / ESP32 whatever. It becomes so much more versatile than using DCC. There are also issues with the tracks, the tracks need to have very good connections and 12V and 9V track is not really reliable connection wise as well. DCC is also getting older and BLE is really, really nice. Of course you could use e.g. 12V middle rails to recharge LiPo's etc. that would be a good idea and I tried that and it works well. Of course I don't say you should not experiment with DCC, please do, but I still have an Uhlenbrock unit and I'll give it to a colleague that does use DCC for his model trains since I think BLE / Powered Up is much better for my purposes.

I did experiments with DCC but there is an other problem, LEGO trains are not heavy enough: the signals are not really reliable. So your best option would be to use powered up.

Well, it is just common sense. If you post in very old topics (like you did from 2017 e.g.), it will be hard to get a good conversation about it. There is a lot of knowledge here so Eurobricks is a great place also if you want to get people to like you, maybe you can start with share something about yourself, ideally with some work of yours. Then it will be much easier to engage with others. Below my post there are also useful links on the rules, so also feel free to ask others like you did in here. Sometimes also difficult, but also try to mind your capital letters / punctuation.

Very nice indeed, lot's of details and still slender.

I use this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12787. The sensor itself is € 1,75 (Mouser), a custom PCB about € 0,50, so you could make the board DIY for about 3€.

I use gesture sensors, they are even better, they detect train direction and distance... Custom PCB to let it fit just between the tracks.

It is very difficult, not one printer is the same. Vinyl printers often use more colors than CMYK as well. You could first print some reference but it is still very difficult. Also the companies that print for TLG have difficulties with matching the colors.

The position of sprues varies AFAIK. Old ones were connected with a helper part and for now parts it looks like the one on the right. The color is the same so that is a good indication at least.

Really impressive, modular buildings to an entire next level!

Some years ago we went to Köln for a 1000steine event, there were also model train fans there and one large hall was filled with this kind of trains that people could ride on. Not very good for the lungs even though they had a large ventilation system, but is was very interesting to see.

This was a 2-year old topic Craig. Don't revive old threads without a really good reason.

Haha :) good luck on that, here we start in two weeks (I teach in college).

Looks very much like the real deal! Very nice job.

You make them in LDD right? You could export it and use STUDIO to render it, makes it even more nice and then you can really see how it will turn up as a ral LEGO set.

We saw :) (so don't :))

Nice little set. I think 4€ isn't that bad for a Minifig + animal and some additional 'scenic' parts.

But that is a US locomotive, totally different class isn't it :)

I just found this interesting article on control+ (magazine is in Dutch, but article in English): https://www.elektormagazine.nl/labs/ble-remote-control-for-lego-topgear-rally-car

I recognize the problems that 4DBrix has, I have the same with the sticker stuff, it is hard to focus on production next to a full-time job and a lot of other things that often need higher priority. Apart from that, maybe we should then start a dedicated topic for 3D printing these? I got an Ender 3 (pro) two month ago, it works really well. I did not try ABS / ASA yet, but PLA and PETG works really well. Not for purists, but even TLG is becoming more and more positive about 3D printing (see their LEGO inside tour part, but I also know that from the educational division).

@Lyichir, yups, thanks for the addition. We visited Kornmarken a few years ago and the explained that for the more difficult parts they keep those molds only in Billund (amongst others to protect their IP) and for more common parts they make the molds in Kornmarken and ship them also to Mexico / China / Czech Republic. For common bricks / plates they have multiple machines producing these parts in each factory so they indeed have a whole series of e.g. 2x4 brick molds.

Welcome @brickman, what are your favorite LEGO themes?

Welcome toe Eurobricks @LegoStories. We are an English forum so please post in English, thanks!

There sometimes might be reasons that they change / optimize the mold, I think that is the most important reason for such an updates.

Very nice job @Mr Hobbles. Nice to see how you combined all those different systems. @GianCann that would be indeed an important advantage then over the standard firmware.

Great! Now it works well, really nice job!