S_Bartfast

That does seem odd. I've only been using Brickficiency for a short time myself and have had a few odd experiences similar to what you describe but like you was able to find workarounds. I've mainly imported lists from Lego Digital Designer and often have trouble when I accidentally use bricks "without bottom tubes". Another thing that trips me up are tiles of "undetermined type". I was having strange things happen when I added bricks that were the same as bricks already present in the list. Instead of collecting the two rows together and summing the quantities they seem to stay as two separate records and strange things would happen. I'm also a bit weary of setting quantities to zero. Another thing you should be able to do, rather than deleting items, is to double click the 'green tick' mark in the first column a couple of times such that it becomes a 'red cross'. I haven't been able to workout what the 'blue plus' state means but setting it the the cross seems to have the same result as deleting it all together and makes it easier to keep track of what you are doing with your list.

Be sure you have the "Condition" field set correctly in Brickficiency. An 'N' means you are only looking for "New" bricks where as a 'U' means you are looking for "Used" bricks. I found I was getting similar errors when I unknowingly had my bricks set to "New".

Well, all the bricks I ordered arrived but unfortunately some of the bricks I needed somehow fell off the order I was however able to partially build the model and show that it does indeed work. There were also a few problems with the design I was able to identify in meatspace so have made a few changes and am currently in the process of ordering more bits. Here are some videos of a prototype though. First, here is a video showing how the trap door function operates: Next is a video showing how the tilting of the tray works: nd finally, here is a video showing the tower in operation with a single die:

Thanks for your responses guys. The order is for 100 bricks so I'm not expecting the package to be particularly small and the price on RoyalMail does come up as being GBP 7.45. I buy a lot of stuff on eBay and Amazon and alike and I'm not sure how they ship stuff but the rates do seem a lot less. Of course when you're buying items for a listed price you can never be sure of exactly how much of that price is for the item and how much is for the postage even if the postage price is listed separately, but still, many of these online retailers just can't be paying as much as RoyalMail (or AusPost) charge. I mean, I've received faulty items from HobbyKing and the cost to send the faulty item back is almost the same as what it cost to buy the thing in the first place, so however it is that HobbyKing send stuff is clearly not the same as what you or I would do. I know these BrickLink stores are in a different league to HobbyKing but there are several 'fly by night' eBay stores that seem to manage to ship things extraordinarily cheaply so I was hoping there may be a way. I have check DHL and FedEx and unless I'm looking at the wrong thing their price is astronomically high! Like USD 61.55 or something! I did also check the 'Splash' page and 'Store Terms' page and international shipping is listed as: 250 grams: £5.00 500 grams: £7.70 I'm not exactly sure how we got to GBP 8.20 though. (Note there is also a GBP 0.50 handling charge which is listed on the invoice separately). I'm not accusing the sellers of falsifying their charges, I do believe they really could spend GBP 8.20 on sending it, I was just hoping they didn't have to ;) I do think Brickficiency does a fantastic job, I just wish it would also calculate the mass of each order as well. Even if the shipping costs were readily available for each seller incorporating them into the algorithm could well be too difficult as it would add another dimension to the optimisation, as would incorporating a minimum purchase. Summing up the total weight however shouldn't be too hard as BrickLink does have a weight listed for each piece. I contacted BrickFiciency's creator and requested that the total mass be added to the order information so the shipping can be estimated by hand and even offered to add the feature myself (I'm a code monkey by trade) but haven't heard back. Anyway, all that being said I think I just have to suck it up and cough up the fee.

I'm new to the scene here but have been working on an MOC for a little while now. After creating my MOC in Lego Digital Designer I then went about working out how to get all the pieces I needed from BrickLink. I have been using the fantastic optimiser Brickficiency to find relevant sellers and while I find I'm able to optimise my parts list with this tool unfortunately the tool doesn't factor shipping charges into the cost calculation and when I come to actually order the parts I keep getting lumped with surprisingly high shipping fees. After the postage cost, PayPal fees, currency conversion costs and God knows what else typically the price I'm charged ends up being two to three times that of the listed price of the bricks. I live in Australia and I understand the bricks need to be sent halfway round the world but still the rates are surprisingly high. I buy stuff internationally all the time (as anyone net savvy in Australia does) and I've never encountered such high charges before. Why is it that shipping charges are so high on BrickFiciency, and is there anything that can be done to bring them down? I mean what's the point in optimizing a parts list if the metric your optimising scarcely even covers half the cost? Here is an invoice I received just this morning for a modest 100 piece order from "MyTwoPence" in the UK: I don't mean to bad mouth the seller as they are probably only passing on the direct cost of shipping, but GBP 8.20 to ship some 250g worth of pieces seems a lot. I mean the bricks themselves are only worth GBP 7.50! According to the weight calculation on BrickLink my order should come in slightly under 250g. I know the calculation is only meant to be used as a guide and doesn't include packing material etc. so it could possibly be a little over 250g by the time it's sent, which may bump the parcel into the next bracket (which is upto 500g) but even so, GBP 8.20 seems a lot for a 500g parcel. Do you guys all get slapped with these exorbitant shipping fees as well or is there something one can do about it?

Cool, thanks for that. Oh, I didn't forget it, I just didn't know what it was . I see now it's just the sub-grouping the kit is listed in on the BrickLink .

Okay, I haven't posted in here before so I hope I get this right. 8860-1: Car Chassis - Theme: Technic -> Expert Builder [Brickset][Bricklink] LXF file (LDD 4.3.8) Extra: And here are a couple of higher-res images: Outlined Sans Outline Errors: I was unable to find the following parts in LDD so made these substitutions: 3739 -> 15038 3740 -> 92912 x467c12 -> 57539 x151 -> Missing x264 -> Missing 3651 -> 32013 and 32039 x187 -> 3648 3652 -> 90258 731c01 -> 76537 69c01 -> 30238 (why not ) Comments: Most 3651's were replaced with 32013's however I used two 32039's inside the engine as the crank shaft would not be securely held in place with 3648's so the two 32039's were used in a hope they may be able to lock it in. I only used two (rather than four) as the others need to be free in order to allow the crankshaft to turn. However, since 3652 was also not available and I ended up substituting 90258 instead the piston is not free to pivot on the conrod which will most likely prevent the engine from turning over anyhow. Also, because there is no piston-conrod pivot it means pistons could not fit snugly in the cylinders so an extra layer of plate has been added which allows some vertical slop to enable the pieces to fit. This slop may be enough to allow the engine to turn over but I doubt it. I also had trouble with the wheels. The wheels I substituted had less clearance inside the rim so I had to rearrange two pieces on each side of the steering mechanism. This rearrangement shouldn't affect the steering of the vehicle but the wheel substitution itself may. There is an incredibly tight looking bush in the steering mechanism that looks as though it would prevent the mechanism from working (image) however the instructions do make mention of this piece explicitly indicating its orientation so it must work, but it sure does look tight! Another thing that seems odd is that it looks as though this model has a three speed transmission (image) however the gear shifter only appears to have two locations (image). Even stranger though is that in construction it definitely seems as though we are building a three location shifter but then it gets covered by a 2x3 plate (image). Anyway, I hope that's all good, Slarti.

Huh, I'd never heard of GBCs before so just looked them up. Some of those things are pretty cool!

Wow, this has been a fairly long read. But now that I have finally reached the end I thought I'd add a couple of humble suggestions. My first suggestion is subtle and relates to zooming. While on the whole LDD's zoom is fine I think it would be nicer if the zoom location were to follow the mouse pointer. By this I mean rather than just zooming in and out on the center of the screen like it does now it would be better if LDD were to zoom such that the mouse remained over the same point. It's a subtle distinction but is how most reputable CAD packages work these days. If you are unsure of what I mean open Google Maps and try scrolling the mouse wheel a little. You'll see that rather than the map zooming in and out on the center of the screen (which is what most people would think it does) you'll notice that it actually zooms on the mouse pointer such that the pointer remains over the same location. A side effect of this is that whatever was in the center of the screen ends up moving but this isn't actually a problem as you are always more focused on whatever it is that the mouse is over than what is in the actual centre of the screen. It really is quite intuitive, in fact it's so intuitive you probably haven't even noticed it but once you become accustomed to it it's surprisingly jarring to go back to the 'zoom on the center' paradigm. Another subtle thing that should be improved is that it appears that each click of the zoom wheel moves your point of view by a set distance. This means that if you are close to your target piece it moves a lot (getting say 15% bigger in one click) whereas if you are a long way away the same movement makes less difference (getting say less than 1% smaller). Most reputable packages (including Google Maps) adjust the zoom by a fixed proportion, say 5% with each click, rather than move a fixed distance. This means that all zooms appear to make the model grow and shrink by the same amount regardless of your distance from the model, which is much nicer. Another thing that is a little odd is that when you right-drag with the mouse the camera orbits about a point that is in someway related to the last piece you right-clicked on. This is fine if the point about which it orbits is near the center of the screen but is somewhat disorientating if you have panned and zoomed your way round the scene such that the orbit location is no longer near the centre and downright perplexing if it is no longer on the screen at all! It would be far better if the camera were to rotate about the point the mouse was over, which again is how most CAD packages do it. The above navigation ideas can still have some odd hiccups on occasion. As in sometimes it can happen that you expect to zoom or rotate your main model but without realising it you have your pointer over a piece a long way in the distant background and rather than rotating about your main model you end up rotating about (or zooming in relation to) this distant piece. It's a little odd when it happens but when it does it's usually fairly intuitive as to what happened (partly because you mouse pointer is still over the 'distant piece') and it's easy enough to reset your view back to what it was. In any event it's no more disorientating than the 'hiccups' that happen on occasion with the current navigation mode and in general it is much nicer if the focus point follows the mouse. Another nicety relates to dragging a selection box. It would be good to be able to set the 'selection box' to either only select bricks that are completely contained in the region (which is what it does currently) or to have it not only select those that are completely contained but also select those bricks that are partially contained by the region. Again this is a common CAD feature. Some packages have a "partial selection" button to implement this whereas AutoCAD and SketchUp both use an idea such that if, when creating your selection box you drag your box from left to right it only selects completely contained items, whereas if you drag the box from right to left it also selects the partially contained items. It seems a little odd at first but once you get the hang of it it is really nice.

Cool, thanks. Now here's hoping it actually works

I think I'll just order two copies of all of them and see what seems best when I build it. By the way, I'm building a dice tower which has a lever arm mechanism: (the blue pins are 'rivet pins' while the yellow ones are 'pivot pins') The idea is that you put dice in that tray then press the lever down which will lift the tray and pour the dice into the tower. There is a trapdoor inside the tower and when the tray is lowered again the trapdoor is permitted to open allowing the dice to fall through and roll into the tray again. While it would probably be easy to overcome the friction of the pins in the lever arm the pins that deal with the tilting of the tray will no doubt need to be as free as possible. Here's a link to a thread I started with more details if anyone is interested: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=109113

Hmm, fair enough. I have just ordered the parts to bring this into 'meatspace' but perhaps I can add some extra friction pins to the order.

I'm new to Lego and while I've been designing MOC (or is that "a MOC"??) in Lego Digital Designer I see there are two types of Technic Pin notably, a "Connector Peg with friction ridges" (2780) and a "Connector Peg without friction ridges" (3673). Just wondering why they have two types. For MOC (man it's hard not to call it "my MOC") I have exclusively used pins without friction ridges because I couldn't really see the point of them but am wondering if I should have used a mixture. While many of the pins I have used are intended to act as swivel points several are being used as rivets like this: Of course the actual pins used here are "Long Pins" (32556) rather than the shorter ones discussed above. I kind of figured that given that arm looks pretty rigid frictionless pins would be fine but might have I been better off opting for ridged pins in this instance?

Any chance you'd be able to fix that Seriously though, I would like to investigate the possibility of adding weight information to the order along with possibly calculating shipping costs. Would it be possible for me to get a copy of the source?

Well, I finally ordered all the parts. I ended up excluding ZOLCIASZEKPLUS going with three sellers for a listed price of 64 AUD. Rather than costing 64 AUD however after shipping and PayPal fees the true cost was more like 150 AUD! Here's hoping it all arrives, (then all works after it arrives ) (:

I'm looking at actually ordering these bricks tonight but I'm a little concerned about the Polish store ZOLCIASZEKPLUS. They have a great selection of parts at competitive prices and accordingly they keep coming up top of my listings but their webpage says: A completed order should have an average 4 euros per lot or will be cancelled. My optimum order would be to get 462 items from them in 70 lots for a total of 48.50 AUD (plus shipping). This clearly averages a lot less than 4 Euros per lot. Does that mean I won't be able to use them? 4 euros per lot seems a fair bit given that most parts are a few cents each. It seems you would literally have to buy hundreds of some items inorder to average 4 Euros per lot, or am I misunderstanding something? ZOLCIASZEKPLUS are also the main supplier of parts in the top 30 recommendations and passing over them makes the price jump from 58 AUD to 88 AUD. Is that normal?

Arrr, thank you so much. I had been banging my head against Brickficiency for so long trying to get things to work but it just wasn't happening for me. I then imported your list and got almost exactly the same results as you did and I just couldn't work out what was wrong with the list I'd created. Rather than modifying the items in Brickficiency directly I was making as many of the modifications as I could in LDD, then I would export the LXF file and re-import it into Brickficiency again. I was doing this so I could clearly verify what substitutions I was making and to try and cut down on the number of different versions of files and things I had. When I did this I would get lists very similar to yours but for some reason the parts showed a much lower availability than they did on your list and I was unable to find any combinations of stores to satisfy all parts. I just couldn't workout what was going on and was writing out a long and detailed post explaining the problem when I realised your list had all these 'U's in a column where mine had 'N's. It was then that I realised I had been searching for "New" pieces whereas yours was searching for "Used", so I switched all my pieces over to used condition and now it works like a charm Thank you

Cool, thanks. I'll check in the morning. It's 1am here and about time I hit the hay. Catch you tomorrow.

Okay, I've been playing around with Brickficiency and while it offers what seems to be a really good service I'm having trouble getting it to work I've modified my model so as to remove the 1x1x3 bricks and I've changed all the "pins" to be "Light Stone Grey" (which Brickficiency calls Light Bluish Grey), and I've also replaced the 4x10 bricks but I'm still not having much luck with it. It's a shame I had to change the colour of the "pins" as I really liked the 'riveted' look of red pins, but dems is the brakes. Even so though, with 1 - 4 stores selected it's still telling me there were "No Matches Found". It also fails to populate the "price" and"Total" columns on the table even though I've given it my BrickLink details. Anyway, the model linked to at the top of this thread has been updated so at least when it's imported into to Brickficiency it is able to find all the parts. Please do let me know if you're able to get this to work. It would be awesome to be able to build this model for 40-50 Euros. All the best, Slarti.

Personally if it were on adf.ly I would have already downloaded it by now As for charging for files, I say pffft. I understand yous has gots to eat but being part of the open source community I say share and share alike. Syphoning a little off advertising is all fair and well but individually charging each person... man just set it free. I'm very new to the lego community and one thing that surprises me is how little sharing of MOC LXF's there seem to be. There are plenty of photos of MOC's but surprisingly few LDD LXF files. Personally I think the world would be a better place if we could all just share (even if it means catching a few ads on the way).

You know those images are actually being hosted by a 3rd party, yeah? As in they're not actually 'embedded' in nor have they ever been uploaded to EuroBrick. If you right click on the image and save the URL or open in a new tab you'll see the image itself is actually hosted by DropBox. Anyway, I've reduced them all to 1024 but they're still being restricted. Edit: Not to worry. I found I was able to go back and delete the links and just reinstate the images.

No worries, I'll get onto it. Shame, I liked the large image, but I inderstand.

Wow, thanks Vorkosigan, that's exactly the kind of help I was hoping for. :classic: I just realised the link at the top of this thread was a slightly old file (without the longer connecting beam I discussed last night). I have now updated that link to the more recent design (with the longer connecting beams). If it's not too much trouble could I get you to optimize the newer model. By the way I actually live in Australia. However, if the sellers won't ship to Australia (which happens surprisingly often) I do have a good mate in Finland I'll be able to forward orders through. Thank you so much for your assistance, And I'm really getting excited about this now, Slarti.

Yeah, there are lots of examples of people who have managed to build working dice towers out of lego, I'm just not sure that mine will be one of them That particular video is by Aaron Balogh (aka Kerby The Purple Cow) who uploaded the LDD file I based my design on. By the way here's a link to a really cute minimalist Lego Tower if you're interested: Castle Theme Self-Loading LEGO Dice Tower Unfortunately I'm not too confident about the randomness of the rolls but it is really cute

As I said, I'm very new to lego so I really don't know much about anything. I used LDD Manager to convert my model into a parts list it then sent to BrickLink. According to LDD the model consists of 594 bricks and the parts list seems to list 90 unique parts. LDD Manager though lists 592 bricks and and only 89 Unique parts. From what I can tell LDD Manager is missing the two 1x1x3 bricks, which is odd since it does have the 1x1x5 bricks. After converting to XML and uploading the BrickLink I sorted the "By Shop" page by "Lots (Unique)" and Give Me A Brick was at the top with 74 (74). Going to Give Me A Brick bagged me 514 items (of the 594) in 74 lots, for a total of 200 Euros. There are two castle wall panels in the model. 2x "WALL 1X4X5 W/BOWED SLIT - Black" and 10x "WALL ELEMENT W. WINDOW 1X5X6 - Black". No idea if there old or new. Give Me A Brick only seem to have the two WALL 1X4X5 W/BOWED SLIT though and there 50 euro cents each. Here is a list to the auto generated instructions including the complete parts list if you're interested: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/lsnf8n3s2oj743h/Building Instructions [Auto Dice Tower - Slarti].html <Edit: These are not the most update instructions. Please use the XLF file at the top of this thread for more complete instructions> Jump to the last page for the parts list. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Slarti.