2GodBDGlory

Looks like you had a lot of fun with that! Getting a 3+R in a model that size looks a bit tricky!

Oh, yeah, I was aware of that! Just making a comment on a related part.

Hey, LBG, my favorite! I still love building cars with 4x of these: and thinking about the fact that (had I not bought them direct from Lego), four 6x6 Volvo Haulers would have had to give up their dashboards to make it!

Brave to attempt a mini rotary engine!

That does look pretty nice so far!

That's super cool, and looks well thought-out! I look forward to seeing what you build with it

I'd love for it to be normal blue! Such a nice color, that isn't used enough. Plus, you can't complain about blue pins on a blue car!

Is it the Osprey's dreaded grinding gears?

That is a cool mechanism! It's really neat how something seemingly complex can be done with such a simple automatic mechanism

Huh, that is very interesting, with the potential for the grip of rubber tracks and the adjustable length of plastic ones!

What's the goal with this project? Some kind of off-road tow truck? It looks like you're learning fast and having lots of fun with Technic, and I'm glad to see it!

Woah, I skipped over this at first as "just" another good-looking F1 car, but now seeing those pictures of the motorization, I'm seriously impressed!

Nice! I've been making my first set of instructions in Stud.io recently, and I'm really impressed with the instruction maker tool! Still learning, though

Impressively obsessive!

Sounds like some cool engineering going on!

Huh, interesting! Similar to the engine one in the 'Vette, but missing the one connection

So I take it this is like a 4L axle connector, with one stud on the one end having friction for the axle. What I want to know now is how deep the other side is. Does it have a full three studs of sliding space? If so, that'd be a great part for extendable driveshafts in the future!

Thanks! I appreciate hearing that Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I was originally going to subtitle it "Proof of Concept," but I guess I decided to try to stay on the humble (and safe from criticism) side and go with "Failed." Oh, I don't think Arduino-EV3 was necessarily the communication problem I was looking at; it would have been more Creality V4.2.7 Main board to Arduino/EV3 that the ideal would have been. Your mention of budget constraints has me thinking, what could I do better if I was willing to spend a little more money? A good first step would probably be using an actual servo motor mounted on the print head for a filament cutter, which is an approach I've seen other people take. Beyond that, I guess just being willing to use the filament to print the upper unit in a very overbuilt configuration for strength. I'd then need to figure out a more reliable wiping mechanism, and how to prevent the EV3 from shutting off. It would be a lot of work, and I'm not ready to start something like that now, but maybe someday! Thanks! The stepper just goes directly into a 3D printed adapter (100% infill, PETG), which then adapts to a Lego CV joint, which drives the planetary hub

Well, this project is a bit outside the typical scope of this forum, but I think it's an interesting combination of Lego electronics and 3D printers, and I just wanted to post it somewhere, I guess! Moderators, if you think it's not Lego enough, feel free to move this to the Technic Pub So, this project started when thinking about ways that my cheapo self could acquire a multicolor 3D printer for dirt cheap. Of course, none of the commercially available multicolor printers were dirt cheap enough for me, so that meant DIYing something. The trouble with that, though, is that you're going to need more motors, and my old Ender 3 doesn't have any extra motor outputs. Sure, you could upgrade to a mainboard with more ports, but those all seemed prohibitively expensive as well. Then I got thinking, what if I could use a totally separate device to control color changes? An Arduino might be the default option for something like that, but that would probably require some outlay to let one run the more powerful motors I'd be needing, and then I'd have to actually learn how to program an Arduino! But you know what I already own and know how to program, and has powerful enough motors? A Lego Mindstorms EV3! After settling on that, the main question was how to get the 3D printer to communicate with the Mindstorms. Maybe it could theoretically be done via some digital protocol, but that's high-grade software stuff, and I'm a hardware guy! Instead, I installed two Mindstorms sensors on the 3D printer: One touch sensor that could be activated by moving the print bed all the way forwards, and one color sensor that could be activated by four different colored squares I printed and stuck to the bottom of the bed. The principle of operation, after the printer decides it needs a color change, is as follows: (Or go down to the video at the bottom) 1. Ram the print head against the right side of its movement range to activate a filament cutter I modeled and 3D printed (Using a Lego spring!) This feature was removed after proving unreliable, but the lack of it was similarly unreliable... More on that later. 2. Retract the filament far enough up to make room in the 4-into-1 splitter I printed and mounted in the bowden tube 3. Run the print bed to the front, hitting that touch sensor, putting it into a "wait for color selection" mode 4. Move the print bed to a position with a colored square above the color sensor, telling the Mindstorms to work to activate the proper extruder, from 1 to 4 5. Run the Mindstorms motor mounted in the upper unit. This ran a Lego worm gear to a 3D printed 40T gear copy, which then ran a random Allen key as an axle, which rotated four different cams on a shaft. These cams would press against three of the four extruders at any given time, deactivating them by preventing the idler wheel from pressing the filament against the extruder drive gear, and leaving only one of them under tension. (Note that some things are broken in these pictures, such as the mounting points for the two springs on the right) 6. Move the print head over a wiper/purge chute 7. Extrude filament until all of the old color has been purged out 8. Continue print I should also explain how the upper extruder drive unit works. I've just got the original extruder stepper motor hooked up to an AliExpress "Lego" planetary hub for convenient reduction. This then rotates a screwdriver (Which had a convenient 5mm shaft), on which were mounted the four extruder gears. This sounds like an absurdly complicated system, and, well, it is! In the end, reliability just wasn't where I needed it to be. First the filament cutter wouldn't work all the time. Then I removed it, but then the un-cut molten blobs of filament would jam once in a while. On top of that, the Mindstorms would inexplicably quit its program during prints, and there just tended to be a lot of mess floating around from the purge cycles, that didn't get cleaned off. In the end, I guess I just got tired of the hassle, and decided that I should probably convert it back to a simple, reliable, single-color setup, which I have now done since filming. It's a sad decision to make, but I still think it was a super interesting project, and I think my expenditure on parts was under $20, which isn't too bad! Anyways, this has taken up quite a bit of time over the past year, but not all of it, and I've got more Lego projects coming! I hope this is still interesting to people despite being only tangentially related to Lego...

Very cool! Huge power at that scale, and a pretty interesting suspension setup as well!

Huh, I was needing those in red for a project I'm working on! The model was originally designed in LBG, so it wasn't a problem, but I'm trying to make recolored options in red and white, so I had to come up with a workaround for both of those colors

As has been said, that's very unique! Very cool, and I look forward to seeing further progress!

Yeah, it would have been interesting to compare! In the end I decided to stop building it, mainly because I was deep in another project that I was more motivated to finish. I almost didn't start anything for the contest, and even after starting it I wasn't too motivated to continue. In all honesty, your super impressive model was kind of the push that got me to stop work on it, since yours is just so cool and ambitious I didn't think I could compete! I did build a gearbox for it that I never ended up posting, and it is still sitting on my desk, so maybe once I get a few other projects knocked off I'll see where my motivation is at for finishing it!

Yes, thanks for hosting it again! Even though I ended up giving up on my entry thanks to intimidating competition and other projects I was more interested in working on, I'm glad to be able to see all the cool things people came up with!

Yeah, an example of that situation would be 2010, where the 8053 Mobile Crane had 1289 pieces, while the far more expensive (because of motorization) and far more legendary 8043 Motorized Excavator only had 1123 pieces, but was clearly the flagship despite the smaller part count. Yeah, I'd say since 2005, when Technic started getting back on its feet, there was a clear flagship every year from 2005 to 2021, with the possible exception of 2008's Off Roader, which wasn't that large or impressive. 2022 didn't have anything of the scale/price of other flagships from its time period, but the 42145 Airbus was big enough and good enough to be a flagship by old standards, at least. 2023 pretty clearly had the Liebherr crane, but 2024 didn't really have anything. If we exclude the McLaren, as we have in the past, the flagship does become the G-Wagen by default, but we've never had a large licensed car be the flagship before, and it doesn't feel like a classic flagship at all. I wonder if the traditional concept of "flagship" has been abandoned by Lego, leaving even-numbered years with UCS supercars at the top of the line, and odd-numbered years with large, motorized construction equipment at the top of the line?