Toastie

With regard to the acid: Not to the extent of needing a textbook/manual. They told us that a million times. But when you are left with a volume-reduced sulfuric acid digestion mix ... It works though. Just be patient. Same happened when my advisor told me: The LiAlH4 is old. Very old. Just use it up for that step. Well. It was maybe old. But from the sound of one small droplet of water diving into the reaction mixture (to decompose any excess) - it was this ffffffouppp type sound. Not that loud, but - somehow - serious. And for the rest of the lab day I was adding water to the mixture, one fffffouppp after the other. With regard to chubby fingers: For the exact same reason I have installed the WhatsApp client, the Zoom client, the Teams client, the XYZ smart multi and media client available on my laptop. Good sized keys, maybe even designed along the lines of old books/manuals ... But: Kids don't have chubby fingers! They ride the screen ... Best Thorsten

This is a wonderful design story! A strong demonstration of dedication. Of ingenuity. Of superb building skills. Of patience. Of so many more things that come to mind. As others have said: Beyond belief. Beyond anything, I can imagine. And yet: Reality. Wow. I am speechless. Congratulations, @Barduck This is fantastic. Thank you very much for sharing!!! Best wishes and have endless hours of fun! Thorsten

Yes, this will do. And when done use ample of soap water to get rid of the WD40 - otherwise brick/plate clutch power will be very bad. WD40 makes it everywhere. Of course, as this is its purpose. Best Thorsten

And this is the most helpful advice - for years - posted, as far as I am concerned. In addition to all the information, you provided. Thank you very, very much @kbalage. I really appreciate your input; also for writing it up so nicely What is always interesting to learn is that a huge company, who has all the funds in this world available, plus, is so much in touch with the community, could not foresee or anticipate that people want it simple - as an option. Young or old, there is no difference. When the internet-connected-self ordering-high power - super designed - coffee maker does not deliver a nice hot cup of coffee after a short night in the morning - as did the dumb, one-button, disconnected, but reliable steam driven coffee maker did, things will rather sooner than later turn ugly. Kids or not, curricula or not: There is a motor, a coffee-maker type thing, and a button-type thing. BLE or not, it is as in THE movie: "Yeah, switch me on". And then see some action. Just my 2 cents. Again. Thanks a lot!!! Best Thorsten

Huh??? How about this: "Dear @Jantayg, do you happen to have made instructions for this very nice buggy? And if so, did you make them available to the public? Or maybe you are selling them?" Also, you may want to voice, why, after some time, you bring this topic up again. I can see that: Beautiful model - and the wish for instructions. I can imagine that then you may even get a reply. Maybe not, who knows. But there should be a little more appreciation before directly asking for the idea, and the realization - rather boldly after almost two years passed. Oh well. Times change, I guess. Cross my fingers that you'll get the instructions! Best Thorsten

And: It was a very nice read ... only after things turned very ugly of course - and you simply had to revert to the books (and the big mouthed "I don't read manuals" statement was never ever said - because you suddenly realized it was all nicely written up, sometimes it came with "is discouraged" - "may cause unpredictable behavior" on the side ... . I can't even remember how often the books said: Don't do this (what I did). But the very best error I am encountering from time to time now on my 1985 ZX Spectrum is: "<line> X:C : Nonsense in BASIC". This tells you, that you are not there yet - and very, very clearly. True. Best Thorsten

Oh my. Using computers since the mid 80's ... another one of the old farts ... welcome to the club, @UltraViolet! You should get your tag!!! Everything you said in your long post (I enjoyed reading very, very much!) could have come from me. And everything @biasedlogic said is also true: Yes, there are these WeDo WhoDoes and WhatNot curricula. And they are nice. TLG put a lot of work into that. But: What if you get a single PUp hub in your hands without any of these curricula at your hands - lets say just the one with 4 ports called Control-Plus/Minus-Super-Hub instead of 4IOHub or the like; turn it on, it blinks, you get curious, and then you fire up Google to learn how to "use" it? Curricula matches? No way. Google tells you: Use Python, microPython, NodePoweredUp, it tells you about Spike, about Apps running only on "smart devices" (as if a laptop is not), numerous GitHub repositories, about BLE and LWP3.0 and - so much more ... resulting in confusion, to say the least. I think LEGO did not play it out well. Absolutely not. But who cares what I think. They are successfully deploying their PUp stuff. Period. Remember the SCOUT PBrick? Documentation was zill about how it really works. Because no one did the "SCOUT firmware teardown". Such a nice machine. The RCX received that treatment ... but why don't we get this knowledge base from TLG? Maybe because it is expensive - very expensive to do so. User Manuals. Here is an example from a long time ago in galaxy far, far away: I reanimated my ZX Spectrum from 1985. It came with: 1) User Manual. 2) Sinclair BASIC Language Reference. 3) How to begin ... The good old days, I believe But hey: PUp sells, and that's it. Best Thorsten

That is one thing. The other is (I believe): Here on EB we are not not (=) allowed to post into old threads, when we make clear, why we are doing it. Something like: I know this thread has been dead since two decades, I need to ask/would like to/think it is/admire this/ ... lets any moderator stay calm and relaxed. As said: I believe. In my opinion there is nothing wrong resurrecting an old thread for any of these reason. I also believe they installed the WayBack Machine for exactly that purpose regarding the Internet ... Best Thorsten

@Lira_Bricks Thank you very much for noticing! That was very kind of you. Will post where it belongs. All the best Thorsten

Wow. The whole thing ... an entire theme. Very well done. Liking it? No. Loving it. So many new building techniques you used - and still, there is a classic feeling to it. For the entire "series". Best regards, Thorsten

I really can literally feel your excitement - wonderful. Keep on going and posting! It reminds me of the time, when I tried to build Reinhard's (@Ben Beneke) BR23. With his help. Didn't have all the parts, needed to wait for - as you said - the postman. Needed his advice. Most importantly: Step by step. Order by order. In your build, I see parts, not matching the color scheme - yet of course. This is so cool: Work in progress. This is what LEGO is all about. Thank you very much for sharing! All the best Thorsten

Thank you very much. I really take your assessment as most relevant for me. As you know, I don't do shows, I am not affiliated with any group, I just do my stuff "upstairs" - because I can. Which in turn means that I am easily losing touch with what I am doing ("for" the community) - and things easily become egocentric. On a side note: When the Zoom meetings roll through the day - just looking left, right, straight ahead and back ... reassures me that all that is real, whereas a Zoom meeting is virtual Thanks again and all the best Thorsten

Ahh - thank you! With regard to your build: All what really counts (for me), is that you poured your heart into it. I really mean that. As far as I can tell from my limited Technic building skills (well, skills is too much, make it attempts) your model is fantastic. But you need to post that in the Technic forum!!! Maybe ask a moderator to move the topic. It would be a waste here I believe. Best wishes (and again welcome to EB!), Thorsten

Oh my. Sorry for all these long "back then" stories ... ... but back then in 2000, they had 4 boxes of the Mindstorms Discovery sets at Fry's close to Irvine/CA ... Sh*t - I just found out when composing this post that they got out of business due to COVID in February 2021 - oh my. Sh*t. I loved that place. I can't recount how often I visited ... Well. The story is now much less a story. But they really made my day (for weeks, months, years, decades ...): These boxes were sitting at first within a bizarre "toy" section they had. No one - really no one in this store cared about LEGO. Laser guns, mechas, and what not - yes. But LEGO robotics ... the price tag for an assistant professor at UCI was not within range. Well. Far out of range. Then the boxes attracted some dust. And moved "up" in the shelves to a level, where you couldn't even reach. When I was asking a Fry's representative about the price, he said: Don't know. I'll find out. Came back and said: 25$(?). At that point I was losing my physical balance, things in front of me faded ... I remember saying: Sounds good, I take all 4 ... One of the best days in my life ... and 4 SCOUT PBricks at hand ... Phew. Out of business. Time to get another drink, I guess. Here is to Fry's - and all the folks who worked there: You made a big, very big difference to my life. Not because of the LEGOs, because of your attitude and care.

Just a minor thing: When browsing or composing replies etc. a message appears on the lower part of the screen, saying: XYZ has replied. View reply (or something like that). Before the update, clicking on that message updated the thread window. For me, it does not anymore, only reload page does the trick. No big deal, but does mess up things when writing a reply or so within the editor. Well. Not important. Just don't reload when replying - and just don't care about the reply that comes in during replying. Uhmm - yes: Not important. Best Thorsten

Hey hey hey: When was this declared illegal - and more importantly by whom? Well, it was not only legal to do that - it was and is a simple but very nice and effective building technique. Around here that is. In my room. Full of hordes of virtual lawyers (MY lawyers) ready to sue the hell out of folks showing up here and telling me that this is considered illegal. There are no guns in the house and not in this room but plenty of books of considerable weight and content (phy-si-cal-che-mis-try), which are readily turned into >very< good arguments for the legality of such joints, when accelerated to some speed in relative short time. These arguments have impact. Illegal . I personally leave that judgement to the after-burnerboomer generations. Well, the good thing about being that old certainly is: We have seen it all. Well at least the sets with 3-digit numbers - back then all made in Denmark. I believe. And that when some building technique is called "illegal" to reply with: "Yeah. Dude. How's life on the other side? Still waiting for that part to be made? Watch out though - time is running! All the best - and here is to feeling good being old (Just picked up a small crate of Bockbier ... ) Cheers! Thorsten

I see. I did not know that - I did notice though a bit more of reluctance to switch from PF to PUp in the Technic forum than here in TrainTech. As far as I am concerned, the latter greater interest in PUp resulted from ample home-brew solutions as well as from the initiatives of many to "break the BLE firmware code", way before LWP3.0 was "thrown" into the public domain by TLG. And certainly also the development of train dedicated software by folks around here. Well, we did not see that one coming, huh? This is in my opinion really the result of the way PUp was introduced by TLG. Rather than focussing on the umbrella theme - PUp - all sorts of things popped up; sometimes it was a new piece of hardware (hub) getting a fancy name instead of a semi-systematic one (which less appealing to the folks in marketing of course) - the same for any piece of PUp software. And then: one specific app for one specific model - or better mode reflecting the model's configuration. I know: There are the programming apps as well. Oh well. I would have done that in the first place and then blown out the special apps. But time does tick differently in different corporate departments ... products are launched before programmers even heard it was - with some pre-alpha testing code that was compiled for some interns to check it out ... at least this is how it sometimes seems to the case with companies I am working with. Back then when I spent some time in Oxford/GB my boss there told me once to "un-f*ck" the mess I made in the lab ... I would not know how to do this here. This thread is certainly not the best place with now more then 30 pages to turn ... Best regards, Thorsten

Please take it easy. Ole is from Denmark - I am from Germany. There is a - sometimes considerable - culture difference between the diverse folks here on EB. Nothing is meant to be offensive, but rather funny. And this is where it gets really between the lines! I am aware that funny and funny is very different between cultures. On the other hand, it is a chance for getting closer together. I have lived for some time in the US - almost for the rest of my life - but then Germany called back. I love the US. Well - part of it. But I do. Not of importance here, I guess. Still: Is 601 just a little good set, or is there more to it - for you? Best wishes, Thorsten

None what so ever. Sometimes things take off, sometimes things are really boring. This thread is fun, as said above! This is the whole idea of EB! Now, with regard to 601: Why did you pick that? I am asking because by coincidence I did have that set as well. And I remember well, why I got it: My parents were out of the house and I was sick with the "flue". Was bad then but: 601 was what they gave me on return. I was so happy! This is a very nice set. Best Thorsten

Cheers, Thorsten

No! It appears as if it does not make sense to do that, given that: Let us assume that @dr_spock is - uhmm already into his advanced AFOL era. Like: considerably > than 8632 years old. I have no clue - none (apologies, if that assessment is offensive!!!). Let us further assume that during that 2000s era, he had some funds available to buy sets of that time. Maybe even a good number. Then he does not need to buy old sets from that time, right? OK: You said bying sets: No I don't either. Same reason as above 8632: Agents ... nice! Have fun with that set! Was it MISP or do you "just" want to play with it? Best Thorsten

Well - same here. But: I am buying late 2000s "parts" (RCX, Scouts, sensors, 9V cables no - have enough - the cables disintegrate, I am just using the terminals) When it comes to NXT generation parts, I'll clock in here for NXT bricks, sensors, and cables (they seem to not disintegrate) Summary: Sets: No. Same reason @dr_spock noted. Best Thorsten

And I really appreciate the work in progress photographs. This is real life. This is how it evolves. And I like the way, this old thread comes to life again: In a polite and "relevant" post. I like that very much. Good luck on your build. Looks really good so far! Will be a beauty ... Best Thorsten

Hi David, posts like this one are real gems for me and certainly for others as well. It is hard to follow/find each solution out there. But the content of your link is more than helpful - very nicely outlined, nice photographs and explanations! Thank you very much! All the best Thorsten

That is very true! I really fully agree on your assessment! And that is why I also do appreciate these types of comments/remarks/ideas/proposals ... "within" the TrainTech forum. Because train heads tend to dive deep. I believe. So this is not so much about derailing any attempts to push things on the big scale. Some folks here (as well as elsewhere of course!) really go "crazy". "Crazy" in the sense of maybe even not knowing what they are doing, but in the end turns out to work. For me, this is certainly like that. I learned so much from @Lok24 and numerous others, you certainly included as well(!). Example: I have my Crocodile on an elevated shelf going back and forth with PUp speed (not power) control. It is amazing. True PUp power! The thing is, I learned from all the folks here how to do it - without that (damned) smart device. Even without the controller. It is controlled by an ESP32 Arduino type clone. I also know: It is just my very own, totally irrelevant to others or TLG or the public, solution. But: Fostered by ideas/complaints ... from folks around here: The TrainTech forum. And to be absolutely clear: Yes, yes and yes. Absolutely. But I'd like to see "them" roll here - and focus on that "task" in a separate thread. Just pounding on exactly that. Kids being able to using "just" the control rather than the app/smart device. It appears to be really nicely doable. Thinking about these dead cheap USB game controllers ... take out USB, implement BLE and a brain. The brain costs next to nothing. The programming will be expensive. But in this case we are talking about the big picture, and not the train heads - who are mostly addressed in that big picture as niche - well - folks. This is just my very own take on these types of posts here: I like them. Very much. And I am ready to join in to hit home the issue you addressed. All the best Thorsten