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Dear All, after @Auroralampinen has very recently posted an excellent and very positive review of the Pantasy #85021 Steam Punk Airship set in this thread, I thought I briefly share a couple of things I did with my own copy of that set, purchased earlier this year. As you can see in @Auroralampinen's review, all 3 propellers, as well as the fins in the back, plus a number of decorative gears, are connected through a serious drive train to one single knob on the starboard side of the ship’s body/aft upper structure. Manually turning this knob turns on everything. This location is fully compatible with installing (literally just adding and securing it with a couple of plates) a Tenka Cubit Motor Cube others here on EB as well as myself have used to motorize their MOCs/models. In the recent past, I used two of these motors to get my Pantasy #85007 Steam Punk Suspended Train moving on elevated track consisting of 5V/12V rails, see here. The motors are propelled by the Tenka Bluetooth Battery Cube, which has BL connectivity (well, as the name says ^^). As described in the above referenced 85007 thread, and particularly owing to @Asper and @Ts__, these cubes nicely hook up to an ESP32 Devkit 1 board or the like, provided the appropriate libraries are referenced in the PlatformIO plugin for Visual Studio Code. Not only one of them Cubes, but many can be addressed, if you like. In addition, the ESP32 also knows how to hook up a PUp LEGO remote (#88010) and there you go, you have two dials and 7 buttons at your disposal for remote control. Upon turning the two BT Battery Cubes, one in the train, the other one in the airship, as well as the LEGO remote on and firing up the ESP32, all three devices connect and I can control both train and airship using the buttons. Or do some automation, as shown in the 85007 thread. ... yeah, there always is. In addition to propelling the propellers, I wanted to lift the airship into the air, and then have it circling around. There is not that much free airspace in my attic (first, it has sloped walls, second all sorts of things are hanging from the ceiling: Tie fighters, propeller airplanes, X-wings, helicopters …), so the radius of that circle needed to be small. Nevertheless, a 3 kg heavy bunch of ABS bricks exerts some dragging force to the mount when pivoting around. mount that airship to one of the two stacked glass disc insulators (4 discs) I saved from being trashed by the Deutsche Bahn years ago when they renewed the overhead lines for local trains nearby. The insulators are simply beautiful. Thick green glass, as if they were made from emeralds. All these years, both of them were sitting in my workshop in the basement, and I could not come up with something appropriate, well, until now . This calls for making a ceiling mount for the insulator and a turntable for the airship. Well, and using another motor for turning the turntable. I selected a second Cubit Motor Cube, as then I could fuel that thing using the BT Battery Cube installed in the back section of the airship. With regard to getting electricity to both motors: The propeller drive is easy, two female Dupont connectors + two insulated wires, as Cubic elements use Dupont style connectors to connect, it is that simple. For juicing the turntable motor from below (to prevent wires from tangling up upon multiple 360° rotations) I decided to running current through the two steel wires carrying the airship. Each is wired from the wooden mount attaching to the turntable through the airship’s roof down to the white 1x4 technic bricks (as seen in section “bag 5” of @Auroralampinen’s review), over to the adjacent side, and back through the roof to the mount. I then made a cable with one Dupont connector with 2 insulated cables and soldered the ends to the two ship-carrying steel wires. The turntable motor uses also a custom cable: Dupont connector, insulates wires, soldered to two alligator clips. The latter are just for the looks – it is more steam punky. Well, nonsense, this way it is much easier to get the airship off the hook for maintenance and stuff. Well, and it >is< more steam punky. Here are a few photographs of the ship and the mount: The entire assembly nicely "swings", when the ship is pivoting. Finally: Yes, I know, much more powerful turntables are readily available for purchase. But there is a strict rule implemented here: If there is a chance that I can make "a thing" from "stuff" I have available in the house, I have to use that "stuff". Upon failure, there are chances for negotiating that rule with the house authority. What was available? All sorts of scrap wooden pieces, as I do the flooring, some furniture, and other wooden construction etc. in/around the house myself. Screws, nuts, and bolts. Used IKEA curtain rod brackets. And little rollers – I simply forgot why I bought them – maybe they just looked … handy, one day. Ah, yes and LEGOssss of course. Particularly these large curved gear racks and worm drives. So here’s the plan I made before firing up the power tools (I do everything in PowerPoint/MLCad/c/p, so forgive me for the crappy "plan"): * This view is with the top removed; the LEGO gear racks attach to the top though and are just shown for alignment purposes, see below. On the right are these mini "rollers" I bought some day for no apparent reason. *Two rollers are not shown, because I so not know how to do that in PowerPoint. And, these were my simply my blueprints. There seem to be cold, riveted girders, nobody uses anymore ... who you gonna call? Lastly, here is a very brief, very crappy video. I will do that again, with more finesse , leading to a just crappy video. I am simply not good at this, nor do I have the appropriate gear. Good excuses, aren’t they? https://uni-wuppertal.sciebo.de/s/6ZmttgTE7igfGQR All the best, Thorsten
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Dear All, one of my favorite themes (in many regards) is Steam Punk. Steam-propelled futuristic technology, in shiny brass, gold and silver, leaning towards Jules Verne's "fiction". Not the dirty dark, maybe original punk. I am not sure whether the shiny stuff is Steam Punk at all; this genre has taken on so many forms and interpretations … Whatever, it may well be that my affection for Steam Punk comes from my admiration for Thermodynamics – in chemistry of course So guess what happened, when in late 2023 I became aware of the #85007 set “Steam Punk Railway Station” from Pantasy/China? Yes, I got sort of positively nervous. It quickly turned out that the title of the set is misleading: They use the railway station shown on the front of the box and the two instruction booklets simply to hide the Steam Punk locomotive along with one carriage. I almost freaked out, when I saw the train. And finally I passed out when I saw that the train is of the suspended monorail type … for more than two decades I was dreaming of a suspended LEGO monorail train – read more about that here: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/150261-wip-lego-monorails-custom-rail-systems-crs/&do=findComment&comment=3680627. With respect to the Dark Side: Pantasy is using GoBricks pieces (as per advertisement on the box) – and these have reached the 100%(+) LEGO quality level, no doubts. OK, as expected, has been discussed on EB. Very small injections points (barely visible), perfect colors, perfect clutch, same “softness” as the latest LEGO bricks and plates have, metal gold and silver pieces all over the place. On their website (https://pantasy.com/blogs/news), they talk about their approach, which is a quite nice read. Building that set was pure and utter fun. It was as if the Pantasy management said to the designers: “Folks, go Steam Punk nuts – no restrictions, just freak out and have fun. When you need more pieces to make it even more glitzy and punky – just do it”. 2723 pieces, BlueBrixx asks for €140, you can get it much cheaper – it is currently almost everywhere sold out, though. No surprise. This set is a blast in every regard. Motorization of the engine From day one, I wanted to motorize this model – it appears to be designed for display only. There are a couple of challenges to do so, though: For one, any propulsion system needs to turn the wheels on any of the four roller brackets the locomotive and the carriage are attached to. Second, available space is rather restricted, as the locomotive is essentially one “solid” piece of snotted ABS – except for the magic glass boiler: (At first, I thought: OK, TLG's well known color vomit coding here as well – but then was told that I was totally wrong: It is right here, where the Steam Punk magic generates the power to propel the locomotive: Inside the glass boiler. Attached is a 10 cylinder V-motor connected to the 8 blade pearl gold propeller on its back side – which actually propels the train. Well, there is no color coding at all in the entire set, except for the boiler brackets. So yes, these colors very well may represent the Steam Punk magic). Third, the elevated track Pantasy used is of the roller coaster type, JK Brickworks also employed for their suspended train (https://jkbrickworks.com/suspended-train/) and thus may be no good choice for motorizing a 700+ g heavy Steam Punk train; this will certainly will fail in roller coaster curves. The original (four individual) roller brackets look like this (Stud.io render) In conclusion, there wasn’t any space other than within the boiler for motorization, but I had no clue how to get any gears, axles, rubber bands to the wheels of the roller brackets. A medium PUp motor may fit in there, but the next challenge would have been PUp cabling and powering. The carriage also provides some space, but no LEGO hub fits in there, even after hefty modding, at least in the lower league I do my builds. But then I remembered a post not mentioning the elephant in the room, a thread @zephyr1934 created back in early 2021 on EB (https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/184036-a-review-of-circuit-cubes-without-mentioning-the-elephant-in-the-room/), which deals – in addition to the Elephant in the room – also with the Circuit Cube BLE hub and Cubic motors from Tenka (https://circuitcubes.com/). Furthermore, @Asper reported on using these (@HoMa called “critters” ) for train automation of his four wide trains, whereas @Ts__ showed a prototype truck for train displays. I looked at the dimensions of the motors (the Cubic motor is 2x 2x4) and the hub (2x 4x4) – and … BOOM – brain currents got ballistic. Furthermore, the wiring between the motors and hub is done with Dupont connectors. Tenka uses 2-wire sockets receiving the corresponding two pins of the hub outputs and motor inputs; however, these sockets are too large to fit through a Technic hole. One can easily make single socket wire ends, which then do fit very well. After some tinkering, MLCad suggested: It may work. My plan was to a) motorize the 10 cylinder V-engine from “within” the boiler section, b) propel the entire train with a motor mounted on a 2-axle monorail bracket assembly, c) route the cables somehow to the hub, which is to be mounted in the carriage in a way that one can easily turn it on and off – and d) easily recharge the hub … so far, a) to c) have been accomplished; d) is on the to-do list, see below. Here we go: New roller brackets for the locomotive and the carriage, and the entire driving motor assembly (render and photographs below). I used two stacked 9V train wheels arranged in the same direction – this way, the (custom) rubber band on the driving wheel has good grip. The rubber O-ring on the powered axle for enhanced traction is one I found in the lab – the white LEGO O-rings do not provide sufficient grip, even on the 12V rails “with teeth”. Here is what I use as my monorail track (no Dark Side elements to be seen, all pure LEGO): https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/150261-wip-lego-monorails-custom-rail-systems-crs/&do=findComment&comment=3680627. Photograph below: One Tenka Cubic motor “inside” the boiler, with an attached axle extending all the way to the front, rubber band connecting to the 10-cylinder motor driving axle. (Custom) cables attaching to the motor are routed through Technic holes in the boiler bracket and locomotive frame. They extend to the Circuit Cube hub mounted in the carriage. Pantasy designed the boiler essentially as an all-four-side-studded central structural element. All other parts attach to this element and, at the same time, the “side panels” secure the whole model from falling apart when lifted through snotted connections. You can remove the two large “side panels” - and are left with this when they are put together (and yes, good clutch power really shows): This is the entire engine … ... and the lightly modded carriage: The photographs below are showing the Pantasy railway station, designed as a terminal station. Some folks were complaining that the four platforms (labeled 2 to 5, prints of course - there are no stickers in this set) don’t make any sense, as the monorail runs perpendicularly to the apparent platforms. Of course this makes sense : Below are four tracks terminating at the station: (track 2) 4.5V track – coal delivery for steam locomotives on track 4 and maintenance; (track 3) 9V track – passenger and freight trains; (track 4) 9V track – real steam passenger trains; (track 5) 9V track – freight trains. The monorail is of course floating above all that; when the suspended train is leaving, all these tracks can be serviced ... duh. I thought this is the whole point … The Pantasy Railway Station … Station “unfolded”: Have a look inside: Ticket counter (right) and barista coffee stand (left) … when you push the 3-elements revolving door, the golden (Technic break) disc and the clock hands are spinning as well – this calls for additional motorization … Train 85-007 ready to depart … no surprise, should James Bond be on board … After arrival at the other terminal station: This is the Circuit Cube doing all the work; charging is from the top (see below, though), the on/off switch is easily accessible from the back of the car. To-Do list: I need to find a way of controlling the Circuit Cube hub with an ESP32. This has been demonstrated by @Asper; he has provided his code on GitHub (https://github.com/asperka/LEGORemoteCircuitCube). Steffen used a tiny M5Stack Atom and used the Visual Studio Code IDE with the Platform.IO extension described by him here: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/184878-controlling-two-circuit-cubes-with-one-lego-remote/. I’d like to use the same program I wrote for my Crocodile; this was done using the Arduino IDE and Cornelius Munz’ Legoino code (https://github.com/corneliusmunz/legoino). The reason is simple: It works with 4 optical sensors I want to use again for stopping at both terminals and acceleration/deceleration phases. We will see how that shakes out For charging the Circuit Cube, I need to make a custom USB cable (space … need a flat top USB-B plug). Make a longer video showing how powerful the Circuit Cube stuff really is. It is simply amazing. Video wise, I only have this less than 30 sec clip: First, the 10-cylinder engine fires up, then the train departs, totally loses focus, stops somewhere , V10 stops as well as it needs to kick into reverse (yes, the motor goes into reverse, this is a Steam Punk motor, no gear box here – you can see that by carefully looking at the pistons, they go down and up upon return, not up and down when it started), train reappears, totally out of focus, stops and gains focus, motor shuts down. I suck at taking videos, I know. https://bricksafe.com/files/Toastie/pantasy-steam-punk-railway-/Pantasy Steam Punk Train.mp4 (Updates will go into this thread) All the best, Thorsten
