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)

Wall thickness will be the issue I think. You will need to glue/weld stuff to the sides anyway which quickly leads to "I wouldn't start from there". I've made values for Lego before but out of brass tube using solder. But the circularity of the tubing wasn't great, so I ended up machining them from solid and paying a bit of attention to rotational symmetry in order to get better circularity. It was still a PITA and I never got the solenoid part working very well (think 9V/1A to switch). These days I know way more about machining but I still think you'd want to ream your main hole to get it as round as possible, then use a lathe to get similar roundness out of your spool. And the even better news is that you can buy cheap desktop sized machine tools off AliExpress that work way better than anything I had access to in the 1990's. I am resisting the temptation to look at them :)

Would you be better off 3D printing a jig or guide so you can drill the necessary holes more accurately?

I'm inclined to wait until those hit pick a brick and just buy them in bulk for a more properer build. If the reading above is correct even Control+ fans aren't going to be thrilled at needing to buy and fit 2-3 more motors and at least one more winch before they can really play with the model.

For those of us without a supported smartphone the Control+ stuff is just another PITA that has to be built around as well. At least that junk is relatively easy to sell but it adds to the cost and hassle of the set. Hopefully there's a decent supply of new truss/BUTPs* to offset that irritation. And ideally they will ship it without the drivetrain issues that made the Volvo dump truck such a disappointment. IMO that's likely to be driving the shift towards a less exaggeratedly oversize model as much as anything else. While AFOLs can get away with "it kind of moves, leaving behind a trail of shredded plastic" TLG should not be doing the same thing. Size-wise I can just throw it in the middle of my train layout because I don't even try to pretend that that's a Lego City build. I have a slightly over-scale container crane that bridges 4 parallel tracks now and is 500mm high, adding a metre-high construction crane might actually fit the theme. (* what's the unofficially official term for big single-purpose technic parts? "Yet Another Technic Mudguard"...)

If the tyre is removable they would make great pulleys for small cranes. With the usual problem that you can't ever let them lose tension, but it's still a heap better than the alternatives.

Yep. I remember having a C64 and being the only kid I knew who coded at all. None of the Spectrum or Apple kids did more than school assignments. So I ended up with a couple of adult fronds from the electronics community as my mentors/teachers... but they were more into the C64 as a cool thing to hack. So I had a C64 with variable clock that ran up to about 2.5MHz (from the base 1MHz) and had 4 16kB banks of RAM that I could soft-switch in using spare register bits. Which was handy for copying games once I added a debounced switch to one of those registers :) These days you buy a kit from one of the Arduino companies if you're a "real geek", or just use a Pi or one of the 200 other sorts of little hardware. I gave one to a 12yo a while ago so they could set up a MineCraft server that ran 24/7, and then we had to plug it in at my work because their parental units like to turn the internet modem off when they're not using it. So now kid uses SSH and a YubiKey to access their server... "back in my day" indeed. My experience of MindStorms is very untypical - I got the first kits, played with NQC, used an IR dongle on my PC to fiddle with them, then decided that writing code all day then coming home to write more code wasn't making me happy. Unless there was something I couldn't do otherwise I never really got into MindStorms. I sold one unit with a MOC and the other two just sat there until I sold most of my Technic when I was in a nomadic phase of life. Then I deleted the virtual machine that I used to talk to those Mindstorms once I no longer had them. But it was hairy... the official MindStorms serial device plugged into a USB-serial adapter forwarded to the VM. I think something like PyBricks is the way to go, just because kids are learning that or similar languages already so the whole visual programming stuff isn't necessary. Even the C-like stuff for Arduino seems pretty accessible to the kids I deal with (there's a strong selection effect there, though). And I keep thinking that there might be a place for an equally modular controller. Make a set of joystick, slider, knob control elements that plug together into a compute/comms/battery module. That would get around the problem of future phones not being backward compatible with the original Control+ Hub. I don't like my chances of using an Android emulator talking to a USB-C BlueTooth 5.1 adapter to run the Control+/Lego Control+/Technic Control+ app (pick a name, Lego, pick one name for the darn app).

FWIW at work we build a couple of devices that include touch screens. It's ridiculous how cheap a complete Android touchscreen is compared to the exact same screen with no Android device built in. We're talking $30 for the bare screen, $40 for the Android version. Some don't even bother with the bare version, it's Android or nothing. So Lego could make a cheap-ish physical controller based on that if they wanted to, the main issue would be that we'd expect them to support it for the life of the sets it came with... 20+ years. My fear is that in 4-5 years we're going to find that the Control+ hubs we have now won't talk to the Android/iPhone devices we have then. They won't run the app, or they won't use the right APIs, or some other trivial thing. I have a couple of kilos of power functions bits and they all work just as well now as they did when I bought them. Except for a couple of motors that have worn out after a couple of hundred hours of operation. The business where I need to grind around the internet looking for Android devices that are compatible with Control+, compare prices and available in Australia, then buy one just so I can play with a Lego set I bought seems silly to me. I'm going to try PyBricks and "Remote Bla Bla" as a workaround, but it annoys me. OTOH, there are so many bugs in Technic flagships these days that it's probably not much harder just to rebuild the models to use Power Functions. The issue UnBrickMe points out where some models require synchronised movement of multiple channels doesn't seem like a real issue for me, I already build MOCs that have limits like that.

For me it's knowing that if I want the flagship crane I'm going to have to buy a compatible phone and none of those are cheap. The Control+ and Buwizz apps don't work on my Fairphone even though Brickcontroller does (I could buy an actual controller to use with BrickController but that seems like spending half the money money to get half a solution). I'm part way converting the Volvo truck back to Power Functions and I really don't like my chances of doing that with the crane. I think TLG really need to bring out some kind of physical controller for the Control+ stuff, because the whole Lego idea of "buy it now, your grandkids play with it in 20 years time" is completely incompatible with "buy a new phone every second year".

Sadly they refuse to use black for connectors or axles as part of their colour vomit, annoying those who want things in the "odd colour" of black. Sort of the anti-Ford "any colour you like as long as it's NOT black". I'm just happy we finally got "Technic, Axle 2L with Pin with Friction Ridges" in black, so I can cut down the axle side and get "Technic, Axle 1L with Pin with Friction Ridges" in black that way, rather than trying to buy all 500 of the available ones off Bricklink. 200 of the 2-long axle version for ~5c each and some time with the saw beats 20c or more and each seller has 1 or 2 of them so it's 20c plus $10 postage each. Now if we can just get a long axle-with-stop in black so I can cut those down too (8L for Euro0.80/$AU1.30 each does not count, give me 12L for even ~30c so I can buy 500 of them).

I got some more parts yesterday, including some old Lego metal axles and some really old red wheels with metal stub axles that go into the black 2x4 bricks. I made my test track a bit steeper but the really old wheels still only just barely managed to roll on straight track. So I didn't include them in my tests. Likewise I now have 8 wheels that take cross axles, so I put those on a test wagon and was equally disappointed (as expected). Those are really only good for fitting to motors, since I don't have ball bearing races that fit them. The older metal Lego axles appear to be very slightly larger diameter, only one of them fitted through the BrickTracks ball bearings so I haven't managed to test them at all. I did a bunch more tests and by repeating some I've established that the variation between tests is larger than the variation between some setups. Specifically, adding graphite to the metal axles doesn't do anything useful (either in the wheels or the holders). With R40 curves I struggled to get consistent results, so I gave up after about 20 trials. Conclusion: even on R40 curves the ball bearing races are significantly better for rolling resistance. They're a huge PITA to work with as the wheels fall off very easily (by design, they're supposed to have Lego wheel holders). Pic below shows the abomination I used for testing just so I didn't have to go chasing M2 washers out of the carpet after every run. The next best option is the old metal axles, with graphite, IMO.