andreww591

I played with Lego a lot when I was younger (roughly 1990-2003), and have occasionally built stuff with it more recently as well. The last non-trivial thing I built, which was around 5 years ago, was a main-beam/gripper-type tunnel boring machine, which I tried to make as accurate as possible with the pieces I had; I'm wanting to build a more accurate one (I'll post some pictures of the old one soon). I've been wanting to get back into Lego for a little while now. My local LUG has a display in an unused store at a mall and I recently went there and talked to a few of the members, although I haven't joined yet. One thing I am definitely planning to do is build marble machines/rolling ball sculptures. While I have seen lots of pictures and videos of GBCs, what I want to build would be more typical marble machines that are more vertical collections of rails and elements attached to support columns, with a lot of elements that are driven by the weight of the marbles, and one or more lifts to circulate marbles/balls through the machine, as opposed to spread-out collections of modules relying primarily on motorized elements (I would still include motorized elements other than the lifts but I wouldn't make the entire machine from them). I would include compatibility with external GBC modules on at least some of my machines (essentially allowing them to be treated as very large GBC modules) so they could be incorporated into larger GBC layouts. I would be designing machines with GBC compatibility to mix marbles and Lego soccer balls/basketballs on some of the same track, with some kind of switches that separate marbles from soccer balls and basketballs (either using weight, or possibly using a color/light sensor); the GBC module inputs and outputs could be connected to a section that is limited to only Lego balls. I would include trains on some of my machines (I'd use an NXT or EV3 to control the train and some of the other motorized elements, probably with sensor multiplexors as well as an IR blaster for controlling PF motors, so I wouldn't have to have multiple Mindstorms controllers on one machine). I'm also thinking of incorporating (slightly modified versions of) models from sets as elements and building marble machines around particular Lego themes. I'm going to start off building some simple GBC stuff with what I have, although I want to move on to building larger marble machines relatively soon.