Repkovsky

I have motorized the excavator using Circuit Cubes - 5 Cubit Motors and 2 Bluetooth Cubes. Free instructions available at https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-248486/Repcovsky/motorized-ec230-electric-excavator-circuit-cubes/.

While the numbers are far from exact, on https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Technic/ you can sort sets each year by the number of people who own (by their declaration) given set. Clearly in recent years cars are on the lead.

Here is stud.io file of the normal set https://fogeyman.tistory.com/1629

Great construction! I happy that my app was useful for you :). For now it is not possible, but these are good ideas for future extension. I hope I will find some time to implement it.

Hi, I just want to thank @Asper for this code, which inspired me to write my own remote to Circuit Cubes in JavaScript, and @Cornelius for his Legoino project which is the cleanest implementation of Lego Wireless Protocol and allowed me to understand and implement myself communication with Lego remote. My remote is designed to control cars but can be also adapted for trains - more about the project in the thread on Technic forum.

Hi! I want to share with you results of my recent works, which you may find interesting/useful: Motorization of 42164 Off-road Buggy with Circuit Cubes Web-browser remote control for Circuit Cubes supporting return-to-center steering. Controlling Circuit Cubes using Lego remote with smartphone as hub. 1. Motorization: Despite the small size of Circuit Cubes squeezing Bluetooth Hub and two Cubit Motors into 42164 Off-road Buggy was quite a challenge, but it turned out to be possible - you can see results below: In case you wanted to build the model (free instructions available at rebricable.com) or use CC to drive your own MOC here are some notes about challenges and their possible solutions: A. Rear drive for 42164 There is not much space at the rear of 42164 - initially I hoped to put hub and motor symmetrically but it was impossible. Transmission of power from the engine to the wheels can be done using 3x 16-tooth wheels, but the resulting buggy speed was a bit low (wheels with small diameter do not help here). The solution that kept neat arrangement of the hub and motor was to use new 20-tooth and 12-tooth gears and chain to gear up the drive. It might be possible to swap hub and motor and move hub 1 stud to the bottom, to use 24-tooth and 8-tooth gear for further speed-up, but this reduces access to hub on-off switch. The power of cubit motor is absolutely sufficient (someone used CC to drive 42128 ), the only thing which can stop the buggy is extremely poor grip of the wheels. B. Return-to-center steering Fortunately putting motor in the front of buggy was quite easy, contrary to making working return-to-center steering. As this can be useful for somebody, here are a few approaches that didn't work, and the final one, which does: First idea was to keep original way of steering 42164 by leaning it left or right with use of the motor directly moving the front axle. This does not work, as the rear spring in buggy is too strong and rotating front axle to one side rather moves the entire front of buggy up, than leans it to the side. Fixing front axle horizontally (no more leaning) + 1x4 gear rack +16-toooth gear to steer the wheels and two rubber bands to return them to center. But Cubit Motor when not powered is practically impossible to rotate even by hand, so no rubber will make it move. I tried to use 16-toooth with pin-hole instead of axle-hole to make clutch, this would, however require to have rubber bands weak enough to allow running motor to steer the wheels, but strong enough to return wheels to center, when motor is not powered. I don't know if this is possible even in theory, but even if it was, finding proper rubber bands would be probably hard. As the mechanical return-to-center was hard to implement, other option is to do the steering to remote control side. Since the original CircuitCubes app does not have this feature, I decided to write custom remote control application using HTML/JavaScript, which would allow to use in in the web-browser in smartphone. But here comes another problem: Cubit motors do not have rotation sensor and rotating the motor by given angle requires powering it for precisely determined time interval. The required precision is of order of a few milliseconds and... it some times works, but sometimes not exactly. To reduce impact of this imprecision I used 8-tooth gear instead of 16-tooth, but still there were annoying situations where centering failed. So the question was: how to make return-to-center which would ignore small errors of the motor rotation angle? Solution is to make some part of the rotation idle and affect the position of wheels only when the angle of the motor's axle is big enough. The motor has attached thin 3-beam, which after some rotation touches the tip of , moving the wheels (see picture below). When it retracts towards middle, two elements center the steering rod. Misalignment due to rotation error sometimes happens, but it is rare enough to not to spoil the fun. 2. Web-browser remote control for Circuit Cubes supporting return-to-center steering The app allows to control 2 motors using Circuit Cubes Bluetooth Hub, the code is available in github repo. You can select channels where motors are connected, revert the direction of rotation (as it also depends on how connection was done), and adjust the speed of motors. Default setting of steering motor speed (125) make it strong enough to move the wheels steering rod and counter the rubber connectors, and slow enough to allow precise movement for the defined return time (90ms). 3. Controlling Circuit Cubes using Lego remote with smartphone as hub. As you can see the application has additional button to connect Lego remote. It turned out to be possible to implement small subset of Lego Wireless Protocol, just to receive button events. This allows smartphone to be a relay for communication from Lego remote to Bluetooth Cube. The only drawback is small delay, but it is not very noticeable. I am mentioning this topic separately, since my adventure with programming Circuit Cubes started from a thread on Lego Train Tech forum, where such relay was made using C++, Legoino and M5 Atom microcomputer (thanks for sharing your code @Asper!). It wouldn't be much work to expand my current application to control trains, and smartphone as a main hardware is more accessible than M5 Atom. If somebody would like to do it I am open for cooperation.

I am not mistaken, lighting is realized using optical fibers or (less likely) new kind of electrical connection, with at least 6 ports available.

Excavators of comparable scale have around 1000 parts (8043 - 1127 parts, 42006 - 720 parts), same about trucks (42112 - 1161 parts, 42024 - 948 parts).

Thank you! For 2024 Volvo I would bet on forest equipment, L180HL - we have already suitable parts for grabber thanks to John Deere Skidder, the only challenge I see is to fit drive for 4 functions (2 pairs of LAs, grabbing and rotating the grabber) in the front part. Vertically oriented wheel hubs are also result of limited number of parts - in such configuration it was possible to lock the hubs using and beams which were part of the front frame and avoid using separate 7L beams for this purpose, as in original ZEUX. I started working on this MOC in... 2021 :). But after designing digging arm, engine cover and cabin I couldn't move on to make it look proportional and I abandoned the project. I returned to building it in April this year, and it took me about 45 evenings to finish it (based on number of saved Stud.io files). 1L worm gear is misleading, as it does not drive anything, it's there only to ensure proper spacing of the gears on the axle :). Here is the photo of articulation mechanism, however it is hard to find good angle to picture it...

It has been some time since the premiere of 42081 ZEUX Wheel Loader, but I haven't seen any alternate build which turn it into classic wheel loader. The idea was tempting - proper bucket, 3 large linear actuators, nice wheels, what else do you need? It turned out another required resource was a lot of time for proper distribution of another ~1000 parts, which is at the edge of being enough for this project (I used ~95% of original ZEUX elements). But after many iterations and corrections the build was finished with levels of robustness, functionality and aesthetics which I am satisfied with, so I want to share it with Eurobricks community. The shape of model was based partially on Volvo L120H and Lego 42030 (to the degree permitted by the available parts). The basic functions of the loader (elevated digging arm, titled bucket) are operated manually, however under the cabin there is some place left for motors and PF battery box (PU would probably also fit), so motorization is probably possible. Hand-of-God steering uses down-gearing with 12x20-tooth gears and gear rack for moving articulated front wheels, which results with smooth operation (surprisingly for such small down-gearing). Engine hood is openable and houses fake electric engine, with rotating fans connected to the drive. This feature was hard to achieve with the extremely low number of gears in 42081, which are mostly used for LAs and as knobs for manual functions. To transfer the rotation of wheels to fans I finally used the solution with moving beam, which is sufficient for this kind of application. Here are some pictures: For more pictures look at https://bricksafe.com/pages/Repkovsky/42081-volvo-electric-wheel-loader-moc-153407. Instruction available at https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-153407/Repcovsky/volvo-electric-wheel-loader. Any comments are welcome!

You could buy it on amazon.pl for 2249zł which is ~505 euro. Shipping from Germany rarely pays off.

If anyone wonders why Sariel gets so much less views than RacingBricks nowadays, here is the answer - well prepared, objective, exhaustive research on the subject, without exaggerated emotions. Great job!

Actually we had the same info in March, but at the time it went unnoticed:

There are also two large turntables under the cabin. Btw. given the new claw piece and the fact that 2024 is Volvo year, I guess we can expect log loader L180H as 2024 flagship.

My pleasure! I hope you and your daughter will enjoy it, and happy birthday to you ;)

You can find both additional parts and the set itself on https://www.bricklink.com/. You can also order parts from official Lego store (excluding electronics) here https://www.lego.com/pl-pl/service/replacementparts.

It is true, that these sets have their dedicated apps, but they can be also programmed from scratch (and indeed in Scratch :)). What they don't have are instructions of specific alternate builds with included Scratch programs - at least Lego do not provide them. But you are free to program them on your own - see tutorials by RacingBricks and the documentation he provided on his page https://racingbrick.com/powered-up-code-block-guide/.

With that budget 17101 Boost may be still the best option - it contains one controller with built-in motor, one separate motor, one distance sensor and it is designed for educational purposes, i.e. comes with a lot of manuals, alternate builds etc. I has only 2 outputs for plugging in the motors/sensors, and it is quite old already (2017), so upgrading with more motors and sensors can be hard or impossible. Technic sets within this budget have 2 motors and Technic Hub with 4 outputs - there is nice buggy 42124 and App-Controlled Transformation Vehicle 42140. There will be possibility for upgrade with additional motors, but there is no dedicated instructions for learning programming with Technic sets - at least no official ones coming from LEGO. Best fit would be Mindstorms Robot Builder or Spike Prime, but their cost is far above £150.

Great work! Could you summarize these results in some table?

You can try to flash it with PyBricks firmware (https://pybricks.com) and if everything will work well, then you will be able to restore original Lego firmware. If Lego and PyBricks firmware update procedures are different enough, one might work out better than the other. You can also dig more in the PyBricks forum https://github.com/pybricks/support/discussions, the community is specialized in Powered Up and maybe somebody had similar problem.

https://rebrickable.com/sets/compare/slow/?1-set=42129-1&1-inv=104906&1-user_list=&2-set=42129-1&2-inv=122865&2-user_list=

No, I mean: check if you have all elements assembled properly. And check the operation of gears (sprockets) inside the gearbox to find out what is going wrong when you drive the hauler backward.

I had something similar. The reason was that I forgot to assemble one pin, that was stiffening the structure of gearbox (I think it might have been the pin in the step 9 of instruction). Take a look at the gears in the gearbox, in my case they were shifting their positions a little bit in the different directions when driving forward and reverse.

Taking advantage of some free time, here you have the extract from Stud.io https://bricksafe.com/files/Repkovsky/42114_bag3.pdf