Phoxtane

Assuming the current draw is actually one amp, then yes - the diodes may be a better option size-wise for better power efficiency though.

A single resistor may do the trick. There's a calculator at the bottom of this page that should do it - you'll need the current draw in addition to the beginning and end voltages. I put in a (high) guess of 1 amp and it said you'd need a 5-ohm 5-watt resistor: http://www.gtsparkplugs.com/Dropping_Resistor_Calc.html

You only need a little bit though.

I'm surprised that they didn't go with green for the WALL-E set, then (very very cute set by the way). It's all yellow-orange and a green separator would have stood out more IMO.

Some veroboard and a linear regulator might work for your purposes. Also, I think you may call that a slip ring!

Sorry, what? Lego doesn't owe you anything, except to produce a set in the timeframe that they said they would that corresponds to whatever licensing restrictions the BBC put on them - and they haven't told us the timeframe, so they're not beholden to any of us to get it out by a certain date. Besides, last time I wanted a limited-run set (#41999) and they hyped it up ahead of time, they sold out within a week and at least half of those are still being held onto by the secondary market, many of whom went to great lengths to circumvent the restrictions on per-person or per-household sales, so I'm totally fine with them holding back the information until just ahead of the release date. If you're that worried, set aside $50-$75 on your Christmas budget and leave it at that.

That was fast!

You may overheat your IR receiver. My LUG has taken to modified IR receivers that power the 9V rails, and they heat up enough to be almost hot enough to burn, sometimes even tripping the thermistor inside each receiver. At that point we have to let them cool down until they can be used to run the rails again. Since I use PF on most of my trains, this isn't an issue for me! I can keep mine running while the receivers cool.

The interior looks great, but may I suggest the use of red as trim on parts of the building? You already have some red with the awnings and sign and I think it'd break up the sort of monolith effect you've got going on. Apart from that, it's turning out quite nicely!

Firstly, I'm going to officially invoke Sturgeon's Law as applicable to Lego Ideas. The real point is that Lego Ideas is just that, ideas, not a place to show off your MOCs. Given that the website explicitly states this: ...I'm pretty sure that means "The barrier to entry is considered to be higher here" or "You must be *this tall* to ride on this attraction". It definitely needs more well-defined restrictions to clean up the place, along with the clause that they reserve the right to remove any projects that don't follow these guidelines immediately, without letting them go to the one-year time limit. As an example of restrictions or modifications that could be adopted: - The model must be presented as its own idea, not as part of a larger project. This would eliminate this project (an example), which, believe it or not, actually consists of just the buildings built on that multi-thousand piece mountainside, not the entire thing. - A maximum upper price point for any set submitted to the Ideas site; given the limited production capacity of Lego's factories, this is a reasonable limit to add in, something around $75-$100 perhaps. The most expensive set produced so far in the Ideas line is the Big Bang Theory set at $65, which gives some wiggle room. - A maximum upper piece count of 1,000 pieces - following the ten cents/piece rule, this gives an upper price of... $100, which ties into the previous guideline (they'd come as a pair, naturally). - Absolutely no ideas that would fall under licensed themes/works that Lego is currently running. This means no Star Wars, no Marvel/DC sets, and now presumably with the WALL-E set, no Disney-Pixar stuff (which also means no more Frozen THANK GOD). This has precedent in that it appears to be the reason that we don't have Star Wars themed Ideas sets, and why we don't have Zelda sets (the license is owned by a competitor). Perhaps a list should be compiled of the more common themes that basically states "No, we won't do this, so stop trying". While this includes The Lego Movie, I bet it doesn't include stuff in the vein of Neo-Classic Space! - "I agree to the Ideas Guidelines" checkbox that must be checked every time you submit an idea. This way nobody can claim that they didn't read them before submitting their idea. Bonus points for having a shortened, easy-to-read summary on the page along with this checkbox, with a link through to the full legalese version. ... I'd also like to see more transparency in the rejection process as currently we have no official reasons as to why an idea was rejected, just some really good hypotheses (see the license conflicts guideline). That ought to help get some of the cloudiness surrounding the process somewhat. As for LDD, well... I'm assuming, given the quote above, kids are NOT the target audience for the use case of this site. Billy's First Car does *not* have a place here, and your presentation had better be pretty damn good if you're showing off something that's not a physical model yet. I think the presence of a physical model is a perfectly acceptable requirement, given that Kickstarter has a ban against campaigns that don't have photos of a physical product/prototype. I'm perfectly okay with having the physical model and a LDD/digital model to showcase what it would look like in proper colors, but you need that physical model to show off that the play features you're proposing actually work, that it won't fall apart from gravity alone, and so on. If you're that serious about your idea being turned into an official product, you'll find a way to make it fit into these requirements. An important reminder though: Presentation is everything, as is getting your project out to the world - I barely even know what the Golden Girls is (let alone care), but I heard about the proposed Ideas set. Nobody's gonna vote if they don't even know about it in the first place. ... An afterthought: Maybe, similar to Steam Greenlight, there should be a (small) deposit that should be paid for a project to be put onto the Ideas site. I'd be fine with ten or even five dollars, just to show that you're serious. The deposit would of course be refunded if your project is rejected/removed/approved. It'd also show that you have access to a bank account in some way, which could serve as an indicator of age in the majority of cases.

Is there a BOM for this? I recently discovered that I could request samples from Texas Instruments and Maxim Integrated, so I'm curious to know what parts, if any, I could test out with this device.

I'm actually pretty sure that's the law in the US, that any website or whatever that supports user accounts must have the user in question be 13 or over, or something to that effect at least. It's been a while since I last heard about it, but when the law went into effect, I do remember that pretty much every major site had an update to their TOS within the week, presumably to include this.

I'm just waiting on Bricklink orders to be able to do any more work on this.

Just about any color will look good if it's a brighter shade paired with the two grays and white for a general color scheme, with maybe a darker shade of a similar color for contrast. For example, I've successfully used dark green and teal together, with the grays and white as a supporting color, I've used dark blue and lime together with just the grays (no white), and currently I'm working on a project which uses blue in addition to the grays and white. For me, the shades of gray and white are my go-to to make any design pop.

If memory serves, 'other problems' means that the manufacturer who was going to be doing their metal track initially ended up not doing metal-stamping work of that small a size right as they were about to finalize the deal.

Don't forget twenty-one licensed figures. Apart from the figure packs and the chess sets from a while back, I can't think of any 'normal' set that had that many figures, let alone licensed ones. Try 10188, the Death Star playset (24 figures) and 7662, Trade Federation MTT (21 figures), actually. Both of which aren't cheap sets nowadays! There's also Ewok Village in there as well. They're all Star Wars themed sets. The presentation is just cringe-worthy, there's no way anybody would look at that first image and assume that they only get the buildings on the giant mountainside, not the whole thing... it smells of "here's my cool MOC that I built to show off how much money I can devote to the hobby". Not to mention it clashes with the fact that it's already a Lego theme.

I've got my final design nailed down, and boy, it looks... pretty much exactly the same. There's two differences you probably can't see at this size: First, the blue grille bricks have been replaced by a set of two headlight bricks and a 1x2 tile each all in blue (much cheaper, and it inflates the part count as well). Second, the 4x4 round plates that were being used to connect the secondary engines onto the side of the vessel have been replaced by 4x4 round bricks in a fit of not wanting to pay an extra dollar for those parts - I had all four of the bricks but only one of the plates, y'see. Now the real question, the one that you probably didn't ask: what about a fleet of these? WELL. The nice thing about digital models is that a new paint job is only a few painstaking minutes of clicking to avoid changing the angle of the camera away. I may end up doing such a fleet over time if the design proves to be sturdy enough.

It feels a bit short. An extra four studs may help a bit, or maybe an extra eight or so?

Here's a much better render: My original plan of using 1x2 grille bricks in blue to add more texture isn't going to work out, as not only is it difficult to get all 44 in the first place, it's ridiculously expensive (think $1.70/piece new, and ~$3.95 USED (???) from another seller)! Log bricks may be another option, but the issue still stands of getting them in the quantities needed - much more doable, but still requires me to order from five separate vendors. I think my last solution is going to be replacing each blue grill brick with two blue headlight bricks and a blue tile - the goal was to break up the smooth side of the ship with some texture, but if someone else has any (cheap) ideas on how to do that, I'd like to see them.

I just now noticed the birdhouse on the back side of the tree. That's a clever detail that's sealed the deal for me: this is an amazing build!

Building the tracks diagonally like this makes everything feel so much more natural. Too bad it's so parts-intensive and hard to get ten people to do it for an exhibition...

How did you make the frame to hold all that in place? I imagine it was actually pretty easy since you had all that internal space to work with.

I think there are some that are taking this topic way too seriously. I don't think there's any need to ask to borrow a mechanism or idea from someone else's model to make something in yours work. Especially in the limited parts selection of Technic, sometimes there's only one or two ways to do something in the exact manner that you need it to do. If you're participating in a contest, where in many cases the goal is to test your own ingenuity, it's most likely the most prudent option to ask whoever you're borrowing a mechanism from if it's okay to use that mechanism, given the situation you're using it in. Again, there may be only one or two ways to make the mechanism you're after work in the manner you want. Nobody said I have to mention who I'm borrowing ideas from, but I do it anyway, because it's polite and sharing techniques, etc., is how this whole community works, perhaps even more so in this particular sub-forum, given the nature of the stuff that's built here. Besides, if you don't, other people will notice and do it for you ("Hey, isn't this thing from that person's thing?"), and people tend to judge accordingly. I certainly do... That's a /fine/ attitude to have. If anything, attribution should be encouraged; at the very least, then we'd end up with more people being exposed to a larger group of builders, and in turn more ideas and tools, and thus the overall experience for everyone is improved. It totally benefits anyone involved. So yeah, at least be polite - everyone else is doing it and it makes everyone feel better about the whole thing. I disagree. Based on what I've seen play out multiple times in various other places on the internet, if someone like Sariel, for example, 'borrowed' a design wholesale from some no-name builder, I can guarantee that someone would notice and subsequently call him out on it (this has not actually happened). A lesson learned rather quickly by some is that the Internet tends to remember these events and will hold it against the person in question for pretty much forever. (Nobody's forgiven George Lucas for Star Wars I, II, or III yet, at least.)

I've built this design in LDD so that I can properly order the parts I need as opposed to experimenting, since things like these tend to require large quantities of parts I don't have on hand to play with. I have the basic box frame built, so I guess this is properly a Pre-SHIPtember build, though I'm not confident I can finish it in time even if funding holds out. I was initially following the 'official' Neo-Classic Space building rules as detailed here: http://neoclassicspace.com/rules but I got bored and went with something a bit more colorful.