jxu

To celebrate the new year, over the past two days I've been working on what I asked about in a past thread: A timeline of all LEGO Themes. The timeline is only possible due to Rebrickable's Lego catalog database containing theme and year data for all sets, so much thanks to them. My code is available at https://github.com/jxu/lego-theme-timeline The first timeline is of some themes I selected. I picked the colors and themes haphazardly, so all suggestions on new timeline views or themes to plot are welcome. I can also compute some statistics like the theme with the most years or the longest continuous running theme, if there is sufficient interest. The big timeline contains every theme (technically, the broadest "parent theme" as there are 459 total themes recorded). It uses the default ggplot colors because I didn't want to think of that many colors. You can download the original image to zoom in.

One of my hobbies during the holidays is to go back and find and unite all the pieces of old sets in my house that I misplaced as a messy child. I can't be the only one who does this? My process is to part out the piece list on Bricklink as a Wanted list, and then buy any remaining pieces. I'm interested to hear any stories of people who have done the same.

Today I picked up 11022 Lego Space Mission parts box, $50 for 1700 pieces. on Lego.com it's $70. If you care about such things, the price-per-part is just under 3 cents, which seems like a great deal (with today's inflation) for new parts.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, but Cutthroat Bricks on Bricklink (no affiliation) is selling a Technic Pins Grab Bag of "approx. 150 - 200 pieces" for $3.141. I assume this is a good deal even if some individual stores can sell technic pins for pennies.

Imgur seems to be safe for long term storage (I don't think they've deleted any images yet like Photobucket hosting has)

Seems to be a similar feature to Rebrickable's sets owned. Now I can in theory manage the few sets I have from BL instead of Rebrickable

I know Rebrickable supports indicating that a model is built from parts from an existing set. Does Studio Gallery support that?

I read online that there are already linux drivers for the infrared device, so I just need to find a program to upload and a C-like compiler. Online I found a subset called Not Quite C (NQC) which matches what I've also thought about creating (a subset of C without a lot of the historical weirdness).

I don't think I'll ever know the exact set, but 9723 Mindstorms Cities and Transportation Set is the closest in spirit. Plus, it's available for about $100 on Bricklink. Back then I and a friend built a yellow forklift, only for it to drive off the edge of the table on video because of a programming error I made Now that I think about it, 4094 Motor Movers may have been included as well. I vaguely remember some clear gearboxes (46220c01) which only appeared in that set. That would also be the source of the long yellow bricks with holes.

I went to a summer camp around 2011ish and they had an old MINDSTORMS RCX kit, maybe as an educational kit, which I remember having lots of long yellow technic bricks with holes (I may be misremembering the color), light gray motors, storage bins, and technic gear racks (3743). Does anyone know which set this might've been? Probably a mix of a bunch of sets. I'm looking through the RCX kits on Bricklink and it could've been any one of the USB compatible kits (no computer had serial ports by this point). I'd like to buy a kit again but most are hard to find so I thought about just getting a bunch of old RCX era building pieces. Also does anyone know if I can program the Programmable Brick on Linux?

Trig... how many decimal places are needed to build in reality (up to the manufacturing tolerance of actual pieces)?

Last time I uploaded to galleries in 2020 I thought Rebrickable had a nicer presentation for MOCs than Studio Gallery. However the Gallery looks much closer to Rebrickable's MOC pages than I remember, with a picture album, likes, and comments. Which do you prefer to upload to?

https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/15917/replace-brick-inplace-in-studio-2-0 Here is a more detailed guide I have the same issue where I frequently accidentally use two different pieces that are almost identical. Here pieces 3794 and 15573, both 1x2 jumpers, are mostly identical and only differ in the bottom molding. If I want to buy the parts for the model, I need to go through and manually replace similar pieces because some stores may not have both.

Exactly. Though I will probably still try to make my own because this is slightly out of date, only going up to 2018 (so recent ex. Harry Potter don't show up), and I would like to color code more than unlicensed/licensed.

I definitely would not list out every set, just a general timeline of themes. My thought was that I think Brickset provides a data dump of every set and which theme it comes from: https://rebrickable.com/downloads/ btw if you're interested in data visualization it's a great resource. If I remember I'll try to make something this weekend.

"Why don't the Lego people have faces?"

First thing I thought of was LEGO Movie's "Everything is Awesome" - ironic, considering it is obviously portrayed in the movie as saccharine vague corporate feelgood messaging, fencesitting and vague enough to not offend anyone. I never got the fascination for monofigs anyway, but I'm not a minifig person.

I don't have one, not old enough :P Maybe the original Mindstorms RCX, although that's not really a set and more a box of building parts. I built little robots with a friend in a summer camp back when NXT 1.0 was already out so RCX was already out of date and probably cheap (not that RCX sets are particularly expensive yet - a lot of minifigs cost more than the RCX brick itself)

Is there a bar timeline for all Lego Themes, like this one but for the whole history of Lego? http://www.brickinvesting.com/blog/uncategorized/lego-sets-timeline.html If not, I may try to make one using Brickset data.

I would love Bible sets, and I'm not even a Christian! I was just reading about the Tower of Babel, and my impression was that God destroyed it, but the Wikipedia page says the Book of Genesis actually says no such thing. The Tower of Babel was possibly inspired by Babylonian ziggurats, which along with the Wonders of the Ancient World would make excellent adult sets imo.

I hope this post is in the right place, as I don't know of a subforum dedicated to youtube videos. I've started a new channel where I anticipate most videos will be on set reviews or small custom Technic builds. In this video I visited the King of Prussia mall store and shot video of all the stuff inside. It may be of interest if you're looking for some sets and can't find them online.

Since Bricklink is owned by Lego now, ideally they could include Lego's own store prices, but that would interfere with the whole community seller aspect of it. The Brick Wizard tool is interesting, but according to its website it is broken ever since the Brick link UI change. That means it probably scraped pages instead of using an API because I don't think BL exposes an API for bulk things like that. For a single user, you can scrape on demand, but in the hypothetical situation for many users it would be more efficient (but less for BL) to be constantly crawling all parts pages and maintaining my own database. I also skimmed the page and I didn't see any description of the algorithm, and I don't feel like mucking around in Matlab code. The author says each additional store adds exponential time so it is likely an exhaustive search algorithm instead of a more clever but significantly more involved approximation algorithm.

I've been thinking about buying many pieces for MOCs I want to make as cheaply as possible as a classic combinatorial optimization problem, like the kind done by businesses with operations research. The cheapest approach is not to order individual pieces on-demand but to buy lots and lots in bulk (ex. 10 lb boxes on ebay) and maintain my own stockpile of pieces. But I don't have the time and money currently to maintain my own inventory. (I think every kid dreams of having a giant drawer warehouse of bricks like in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcGgfOVpPM) I first thought about this problem when using Bricklink's wanted lists. By default, when clicking "Buy All", the site sorts by stores with unique lots. I think the reasoning is, if I am buying a decent number of lots and I can get it all from one store, then I will only pay for one store's S&H, which has a good chance of being cheaper than buying from two or more stores. Often this is not possible and I need to buy from two, three, four, or more stores. My approach was to buy using a greedy method for unique lots: try to have one store cover say 90% of lots, then have another one or two stores cover the remaining 10%. The idea here is to minimize the number of stores to buy from to minimize S&H costs. But I haven't actually done experiments to see if this is really a good method or not. It could very well be that buying roughly the same proportion of parts from multiple stores ends up cheaper. Then I found about Bricklink's "Easy Buy" option. Whatever algorithm they use, it usually does a good job in keeping costs low while not buying from too many stores. Some BL stores don't list S&H which can drive up costs, especially for international orders. It doesn't consider Lego's own parts shop which I haven't gotten a chance to use. But it is a lot easier than manually trying combinations. What really inspired me to think about this algorithmically is Rebrickable's Multi-Buy option. They give you more options to tune the algorithm by providing three starting points: cheapest stores, largest stores, and minimize delivery (you can put in an estimated average delivery cost). In my experience, minimize delivery (almost the same as minimizing number of stores) gives the best total prices. Unfortunately they don't have an option for setting two different delivery costs, one for domestic and one for international, since domestic costs are usually a lot lower. Although they both have access to BL seller data, BL's Easy Buy still seems to do a better job finding combinations. I wonder if there are any other automatic tools to try to do this price optimization. As a Bricklink seller I have access to their API but I believe that is for my own store. These weighted set cover type problems are computationally hard but with a strict limit on the total number of stores then they become reasonable to solve fairly well (and the trivial O(n^k) solution for choosing k stores from n total). Here's a CS paper on these kinds of problems if you are interested: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~barna/paper/ICDE15_research_131.pdf (I wouldn't have spent so much time thinking about this if Legos weren't so frickin expensive!)

@Coder Shah I never had those sets. I found the Classic Clock programs on a Reddit post, though I probably have them on my old computer. I think I only have 8527 which should be easy to find programs for I assume.