BusterHaus

Your proposed solution makes very little financial sense. The programming brick is $190, plus $60 for 4 cables, plus $40 for color sensor, for a total of $290. Unless saving a few dollars is really crucial, I would suggest getting the full EV3 kit for $350. It comes with additional sensors, all the cables that you need, three servo motors and a whole bunch of Technic elements. The Mindstorms kits is quite different from Power Functions. You program the motors to move a specific amount and they do it. There is no need for manual control. You can determine how many rotations it takes to move the elevator between floors and simply hard-code it into the program, instead of using a color sensor to check for floors. The program can begin by bringing the elevator to the end of its travel to find the start position. This can be accomplished with a touch, color or proximity sensors, but you can also skip the sensors all together if your system has a hard stop and find at which point your motor stops turning (measure rotation over a certain time, and if it's lower than X, that's the end of your travel). As far as I know, SBrick doesn't have apps that are programmable (ex: move motor for 3 seconds then stop). You may also want to look at WeDo, it uses Power Function motors and is programmable through a computer. Mindstorms may be overkill for your application.

You need more than just a cable to use the color sensor, it will not work on its own. The sensor is plugged into the input side of the Mindstorms Programmable Brick and the motor(s) are plugged into the output side. Power Functions motors can be used, but it's much easier to use the EV3 motors. The motors have encoders, so the elevator can be programmed to stop at certain floors or even detect the end of travel. The color sensor can be used to detect the "floor" as well.

That's a pretty sweet sign. What a thoughtful gift.

I think that up to now the colour in vogue has been dictated by the sets available. Red panels were available first in large quantities and varieties, in the past few years 42025 and Mindstorms supplied quite a few white panels, which is why you're seeing more white now. The white panels became even more abundant with the arrival of the heavy lifting helicopter. The recent release of 42038 should give more orange cars/MOCs in the near future, and the Crawler Crane will bring an era of blue ones, especially since the new curved panels are now available. I also think builders get excited by seeing creations in new colours (let's ignore shapes for now). Everyone else notices that creations in a new color are possible, builds in that color and eventually gets tired of it, which is why we see changes in popularity of MOC colors. They switch to whatever new color is available and the process begins again.

Your description makes sense, although it still sounds incredibly slow and challenging. Glad to hear not even knots can stop you! :thumbup:

Looking good! I checked rebrickable and apparently I have all the parts to build this set, so that's scheduled for the near future. By the way, how do you tie knots on strings? It seems almost as challenging as threading a needle.

I guess it's a good thing these clients aren't Lego purists.

The pulley system is excellent, great build.

The lights are great! They look very well scaled. Although I see you had to modify some bricks to pass the LED wires...

I doubt they would be any better. The issue is not the width, it's the lack of a bead groove on the ball. The bead isn't very resistant to twisting unless it is held in place, so this problem will exist unless you use a rim with grooves.

Fantastic work, Grum. You may want to look into getting an assistant to dab your forehead while you build such complex assemblies, much like a nurse that wipes the sweat off a surgeon during an operation.

It won't work. The tire twists on the ball much too easily:

You have changed my mind about the mini chain links. I rarely use them because I have doubts about their strength, but your forklift is turning me around. Great performance and a nice build, too.

Here is a C-Model for the Technic 42045 set. The small sets turn out to be more challenging for C models, as the part count is rather limited. Instructions are available by clicking here. I used LDCad to make them and it left me with a good impression. The final stepping and rotations were done in MLCad, and the layout was done in a PDF editor. The layout is pretty efficient, but is rather time consuming. I'm not sure if I will use it in the future. There is a small mistake in the instructions - they ask for two 5L half-beams for the propellers, while the set comes with 4L half-beams.

I'm also quite impressed with the mechanism under the roof. That's a lot of action in a very tight space. Great build.

This may have been answered before, but why do current PF and Mindstorms motor sizes start at Medium? Is this a marketing gimmick, or is the Small size intentionally left available in case Lego decides to produce a smaller motor?

Isogawa's Idea books are excellent. He uses very common parts and keeps the machines simple, so you don't need a big lot of bricks to build them. Even if you are missing parts, the mechanical concepts are clear enough that they can be built with other pieces.

The claw grabber is great, I like how clean it is and all the features it has in the small package.

I think Blakbird nailed it with his answer. The only thing that I would add is the sharing of knowledge through instructions, photos and videos. In a way, this is collaboration as well: for example, if I want to include a sequential gearbox in my model, I can pick from many different models built by many different people. I don't need to reinvent the wheel, just offload (for lack of a better word) certain assemblies to other builders. And when I come up with a useful mechanism, I pay back by providing instructions or picture.

Welcome back from the dark ages! This is a nice build, there are some differences in proportions with the real car, but a good effort overall. Keep going.

I built one that was five studs wide and found that the use of friction pins helped a lot. It eliminated quite a bit of the slack in the system. Here's the only picture I found, sorry about the potato quality - it was in the background of a quick picture. It's pretty wide but wasn't that wobbly.

Great to see another WIP from you Grum. This set is probably one of the few that I wish I had bought when it was in stores. I'm looking forward to watching your progress and seeing this set come together. Oh, and please post some pictures of the shed already.

Another vote for splitting the model into a lot of submodels - it helps with the work flow by dividing the instructions into smaller chunks that that make the whole model less daunting. I like to make submodels that take less than an hour to build on the computer. I can then do one, two or even three submodels per evening. It's also much easier to spot mistakes in submodels. I used MLCad for most of my instructions up to now and it has some real advantages when it comes to the stepping/rotating of models. However, the lack of autosnap is a big drawback. You can compensate a bit by not having the axles and gear holes or gear teeth aligned without interference, as such collisions are rarely visible in PDF instructions. I recently spent some time learning LDCad and it is much faster to work with than MLCad. I built the model in it and did the stepping/rotating in MLCad. I think version 1.5 now supports better stepping, so maybe it's no longer necessary to use both programs. Either way, making good instructions is very time consuming. I now adopted a policy of only making instructions for more interesting mechanisms or for C-Models, as anything else is probably not going to be useful to anyone. I also tried photo instructions, but those are a different beast.

A small exchange with Jeroen Ottens about wheel arches on his beautiful 328 Hommage got me wondering if, with the pending release of wheel arch panels with the Porsche, we will eventually see Technic wheel arch panels for different wheel diameters. Is there a precedent which could offer guidance?

I think what I noticed was the difference in modelling style - the rest of the body is very closed, and the wheel arches were more open. Just a different look from the usual supercar body that has gaps and wheel arches made with flex axles. Still looks like an excellent replica.