Captainowie

I have a bunch of spares, but it seems I always pick not quite the right things to have spares of!

Do you really want all six faces moving? What about the face that the cube is sitting on?

You can test this with your fingers. Hold a beam with your thumbs in the middle, and forefingers at the ends and see how much force it takes to deflect. Then rotate the beam around it's long axis and try again - there's a noticeable difference in the amount of deflection you get for a given amount of finger pull. Orient your beams with the holes parallel to the load!

I probably should have shot a short vid, rather than rely on stills alone to show how it works. All it does is step a diameter around a circumference. For Pi diameters, you get one full rotation of the output (that's what Pi means), and one full rotation of the input crank steps two diameters, hence Pi:2. The hardest part was keeping the "diameter" wheel in the same plane while still forcing it to keep contact with the "circumference" wheel - though I could probably have done a better job of it than I did here. The precision of this is comes down to the ratio between the thickness of the wheel part and its diameter, which in this case is about 10%. If you wanted to do a proper version next year, with an actual explanation and coordinated colour scheme, I wouldn't take offence!

You're right, probably not. Sorry @TeamThrifty, I didn't intend for it to come across as a lecture.

Yeah, but this (and your previous effort) relies on already knowing the value of Pi to some precision - you'd use exactly the same techniques to get a ratio of any rational number. Also, it's enormous. I built a much more compact device that has a Pi:2 ratio, computed directly from the definition of Pi! Aside: [removed]

There are already lots of amazing GBC things here and here I can't see this thread adding anything new.

Upload to some hosting site (e.g. bricksafe.com) and use the links from there.

Mechanical one-at-a-time widgets are not a new concept. You can see my own implementation here And several more in this video from a few years ago. Yours is nice too.

If you don't mind a learning curve that's a little steeper, I'd recommend LDCad as an alternative editor. It has a triangle solver so that you can set precisely the angles you need for each part, and relative grids, so that once you have one part on the correct angle, you can set the relative grid to that angle, so that all parts connected to your sloping part are positioned correctly.

... wouldn't one need more than 60 balls in "just over 1 min" to meet the 1 ball per second spec? Not that it'd be a huge problem, most shows I've taken stats at average 0.4 - 0.6 balls per second.

Surely an infinite chain of gears would behave very much as the very finite version at the top of this thread. The friction may well increase without limit, but that's no different than sticking an anchored axle through an off-centre hole.

If you're going to include banana gears, you've got to put in Hailfire wheels too!

As long as your laptop meets or exceed the Stud.io recommended specs, you should be fine. The overhead in Wine translating Windows system calls to Linux ones is not great, though there may be some configuration changes you'll need to make to get peak performance.

Two axleholes in bricks separated by two plates in the vertical direction are the same distance apart as two axleholes separated by one axlehole in the horizontal direction. Given that that's the spacing of that gear pairing, there really shouldn't be any problem with the setup you posted.

I never found a solution to the problems I had mentioned earlier in the thread, and ended up using a Win10 VM. It was a bit slow because all the graphical computations had to be done by the host's CPU (I don't have a motherboard that accepts two graphics cards, else I'd install a second one to pass through for the VM), but workable.

I just checked the website, and the only options for download are Mac and Windows 32/64 bit. What exactly do you mean when you say it works "out of the box"? Are you using the Windows version over some kind of emulation (like Wine)? or something else?

If you're looking to minimise total volume, then maybe stripping down the sets isn't your best move - I suspect that an assembled set with the sticky-outy bits taken off is a more dense way to store bricks. Good luck though.

Can it be done in LEGO? Almost certainly. Though it might need to be at a different scale. But regardless, that's a pretty neat machine.

I admit I'm not caught up on the latest parts to come out of the Technic lineup, but I'd be surprised to see a new 5x11 panel with that configuration of pinholes. This looks to me like a clone brand, rather than a direct knock-off. And there's nothing inherently wrong with clone brands - LEGO's patents have long since expired. For the same reason, I wouldn't expect this to be a stolen MOC - unless someone is using clone brand parts that are slightly different from their LEGO equivalents in their MOCs.

Yes, that's the resource you'll want. The best part is, when you have two switches like you're suggesting, you can hard-link them together such that they can only travel off/forward to reverse/off. Then all you need to do is have the right amount of slippage on the motor, whether that's from a white clutch gear, or a regular gear on a friction pin, or rubber belts, or whatever!

You can achieve what you want (lights on when in forward direction, off when in reverse) by mechanically connecting a motor with a clutch or other slipping mechanism to the switch that controls the lights, and physically blocking the travel of the switch in one direction. The switch that controls the motor is then the switch that you use to control the lights. But I don't quite see why that is needed for static lighting of houses in a city scene?? Could you not just use a separate circuit and restrict yourself to using only forward/off for the lights?

What you develop will depend on a lot of things: How brief is "brief", and what format will you use? One hour per week for 8 weeks needs a different setup than one 8-hour workshop. What is your goal? Are you trying to teach basic mechanics and using GBC as motivation? Or are you specifically trying to produce GBC builders? What will the assumed knowledge be? An AFOL might already know about how to build sturdy structures, and a high-school student might already know about how gearboxes work. Most of Sariel's The Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder's Guide will be useful reference material, though the parts descriptions are now a little dated (*shakes fist at LEGO for continually bringing out new parts*). Hope that helps Owen.

The old Technic Turntable Top (http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/2855) has 56 teeth, and meshes nicely with an 8-tooth gear for a 1-7 ratio. If that's too big, there are other gears with multiples of 7 teeth, including most of the various differentials, the old (and thin and frail) 14-tooth gears, and the newer small turntable.

I don't think that's a position that's held by anyone who has actually been involved in organising a multi-hundred module layout - a layout twice the size requires more than twice the effort to pull off. So what do you tell the young builder who's missed out on a spot on this year's workshop, but brought his module from last year? "Sorry, but we already have some of those, you can't display with us this year"? The vast majority of those older modules were still contributions from multiple individuals, rather than one person showing up with a box of identical modules. How do you determine who can participate and who can't? So what counts as "unique"? If I build a workshop module in a different colour scheme, is that unique? What if I add some decorative elements? What about if I make some part substitutions? What if I make a lot of part substitutions (e.g. taking a module that's mostly System bricks with a few Technic parts, and re-implementing it wholly in Technic)? What if I keep the lifting mechanism but change the input and output areas? What if I build my own module that happens to use the same principle? Where do you draw the line between what's the same and what's different?