Moz

That's amazingly quick reverse engineering, well done!

Just like the real thing. These days farmers sit there supervising the computer that's operating the vehicle way more often than they actually steer it. I'm kind of amused at the number of youtube channels where "flying the drone" seems to occupy a great deal of cockpit time. I'm mostly excited because we have something other than cars in the mid-size technic sets again. I suspect I'm going to buy several of them next year.

I don't look for B models when buying very often, but I've definitely built them. There's been a couple of sets where I preferred the B model. But also, I am not a model collector, they're more like parts packs with ideas. In that sense more ideas = more better so I do prefer to have the B

I really appreciate that approach. And I like the way not every set always gets at least 4/5 on every aspect. Too many reviewers talk up even the worst sets so all I'm really getting is more footage of the model, not an idea of whether the "reviewer" likes the set or thinks it's worth buying. Flip side it does feel as though Sariel has been a bit down lately or at least his reviews lack enthusiasm. But OTOH *my* enthusiams for yet another Technic car is limited too. I second the "we can't afford to give sets away to reviewers who might not gush over them to 100k fans" viewpoint.

I have a roll of waxed cotton that I use for models, it's stiffer than official Lego stuff but works well enough. 1mm braid is more expensive if you want proper flexible stuff. I have 0.9mm kevlar braid for another application and that is stiffer than the waxed cotton (but stronger, obviously, if for some reason you need 1kN string in your Lego model...

I've built a few, but they tend to be either repeats like the road train (six trailers, each with gate open + tip) or are complex enough that you probably don't want to operate more than a few functions at a time (tractor with bucket and backhoe). What would be good is two channels with more current capacity so you can put a couple of XL motors on each for powering things like large crawler cranes. But still maybe 5A tops, at 9V or so. In many ways having two 8 channel receivers makes more sense, it lets you put them in different parts of the model. It's still one part from the manufacturers point of view, it "just" requires software that can control more than one at a time. Which is useful anyway, letting you the owner have one controller for multiple models and even control more than one at a time, or switch between them quickly and easily (using a forklift or digger to (un)load a truck for example) I do wonder whether standard RC controllers would be the way to go, with the design effort going into a dedicated brick-compatible receiver. A basic 8-10 channel transmitter is about $100 from China and there's a few decent brands to choose from. Or you can get the RC car style pistol grip things that are simpler to operate (at the high end RC transmitters have several analogue joysticks as well as a bewildering array of buttons and switches)

I have a Fairphone 3 (which runs a very recent version of Android). The Lego app installs and runs just fine, but it will not connect to any C+/PU device I've tried. Buying a scumphone is definitely an option, but it's a significant ethical cost as well as financial. I played around with a couple of older APKs but they had the same problem, as did the alternative C+ control apps that I tried. I vaguely recall looking at the officially supported devices list and being surprised that there were so few on it, but that's kind of irrelevant because there's no intersection between the "less awful smartphones" list and the "Lego compatible" list. Which puts a real dent in TLG's claims of caring about environmental or social impacts. It doesn't help that trains come with physical controllers and the PF controllers are half way to a modular physical controller setup already. Which suggests that there is some kind of market for a physical C+ controller beyond the train one.

Really? I'm one of the unlucky few whose smart device isn't compatible? That's disturbing.

... don't already own a compatible smartdevice. TLG have also not guaranteed that they will work after release, unlike the rest of their products. It falls under the "software has not warranty" exception.

I like this a lot. It's something I've been thinking about off and on since I bought some wide-radious curves because one of my somewhat dodgy models does not like jerk at all. Most obvious with Lego official points because of their horrid curves, and the crossover is almost as bad. This setup is also a good way to gently encourage rolling stock to turn tighter than you think it really should :)

I'm really hoping for a revisit of something like 42042 using the dedicated "truss boom only" parts so that I can buy a Technic set that includes the valuable part of this one. Any kind of boom crane, even a rail container crane would be fine. Ideally without electrics, because while I have a couple of Control+ things they'd not in my top 10 of Lego electric systems. I rate the old 4.5V first-generation motors that only worked with metal axle wheels as the closest parallel (those were also expensive, didn't work very well, and stopped working within 10 years). I'm torn between hoping the trusses come out on Pick a Brick at a reasonable price and suspecting that these will go the way of a lot of other single-use parts from pricey sets and never be seen again. But if TLG is feeling particularly cranky they'll produce a single-colour crane using all the key parts except it will be green.

The more I think about it the better 42042 "crawler crane" seems. Especially by comparison. The price of 42146 would buy a MISB 42042 if that's what you want, plus enough extra parts to rebuild it to the larger scale and then quite a lot more. Using actual beams and whatnot, rather than playmobil parts. Not to mention that train weights are available on PaB right now. I'm kind of sad, I was hoping this would be worth while even with Control Plus.

I much prefer mechanical safety over relying on the software. So design the linkages (etc) to use the full range of servo motion, or at least tolerate it. In the past I've used a really short servo arm to bump the switch from side to side so that the full servo travel wasn't necessary but also didn't matter. That made setting them up easy, as long as the arm didn't hit the switch mechanism when it was going in everything was fine (the arm can't be on the wrong side or in the wrong position). That can be set up to make the official shifting mechanism unnecessary (I was using official Lego switches so I had to remove the manual lever and grind down the friction mechanism). With BrickTracks you absolutely will break them if you over-rotate, so I would be very tempted to not use their mechanism at all. A quick play with one suggests that putting a post through the hole that the rotary mechanism attaches to should give a servo arm something to bat back and fort as it rotates past. The other option would be gearing the servo down so it only has as much rotation as the BrickTracks mechanism wants. But it would likely be easier to 3D print a variant of their mechanism that has a servo drive hole in the middle and requires/allows as much rotation as the servo provides. Then you just have to get the alignment right when joining the two. (edit) mechanism sketch (paint.net sketch of the mechanism)

That looks really good. Proportions seem reasonable - if anything both your model and the real thing look a bit short to me. I like the brick-built side details, much better than stickers and well worth the effort.

Lego have to deal with the full software stack too, all the way from embedded firmware up to phones apps. That's quite a range and modern "Javascript on the server *and* on the client" full stack developers won't have any idea. Company I write software for is in the same position and we find hiring people slightly difficult for that reason. It would IMO make sense to hire in the app development since that's an area where there's lots of companies providing that service. So Lego could get a full team of cross-platform developers to build high quality phone apps without having to keep them around forever. The tricky bit is the bluetooth connectivity and that's where I fear Lego have not even realised that there could be a problem, let alone put any effort into fixing it. "just buy one of the four official supported smartphones" is a really atrocious response to problems. The firmware level stuff is where I'd expect them to build an engineering team and stick with them. Get a few people who understand how the electronic hardware goes together and how to write software (firmware) for it. Then keep them busy building new smart widgets and improving the ones they have (at this stage every motor and battery box has software in it). You could look at Victron for an example (Dutch company making high end solar electronics)