Now at Auckland Airport where I made a point of stopping by this LEGO model of Auckland Airport. Completed this year to mark the airport’s 60th anniversary, it showcases the original 1966 airport (not shown here) alongside this 2029 vision, when a new domestic terminal will be integrated with the international terminal.
Category: LEGO
LEGO welfare check
Dwight had minor hand surgery this morning (carpal tunnel release). Some time after he disappeared into the den this afternoon, I decided I’d better do a welfare check. Despite the surgery, it turns out he’d been busy staging this LEGO Christmas village.
LEGO machine to align plates stud-side up
Lined up recently introduced large LEGO worm gears as a conveyer for 1×1 plates, much like an Archimedes (water) screw. An unexpected bonus was that the plates were consistently flipped stud-side up. This replaces all my work in recent weeks on pneumatic devices to flip 1×1 plates. Click through for a short video I made today.
A LEGO plate flipper
Successfully prototyped a machine, shown here, that accepts a LEGO 1×1 plate, regardless of whether it’s stud-side up or stud-side down, and spits it back out stud-side up. (Motorized pneumatic valves, an air compressor, and a computer are off-camera.) This afternoon I worked on my next challenge: a feeding mechanism to supply this machine from a queue of randomly oriented plates.
A tasteful little movie
Posted my new YouTube video: Filtering LEGO Stud-Side Up. I thought about calling it Studs on Top, but decided against it to avoid drawing in the wrong crowd. I also skipped the LEGO nerd term SNOT (Studs Not On Top) to keep it family-friendly. Click through to watch.
A LEGO motorized X-Y platform prototype
Prototyped a motorized X-Y platform with a focus on simplicity, minimal height, and visual balance. This allowed me to get familiar with two components recently introduced by LEGO: a new design of worm gears (which I combined to create linear actuators) and the platform itself. The platform is easily swapped out, an important feature for the project. Meanwhile, I have a lot more mechanisms to prototype.
Parts for a new machine
These LEGO parts arrived today, while I wait for other parts to be shipped from LEGO in Europe. I feel a new model coming on, or at least a series of prototypes as I figure out the engineering.
Exploring AI-driven LEGO design
Installed software from Carnegie Mellon and linked it to their AI Large Language Model for designing LEGO models. It takes text (I requested “Matterhorn”) then designs a LEGO model that’s physically stable and can be built. It lists bricks and their placement in a 3D grid, and produces a CAD drawing that can be digitally disassembled and reassembled, mirroring real-world construction. Currently, it doesn’t support LEGO Technic construction, my primary focus.
Cherry blossom time at Himeji Castle
The cherry blossoms have opened at Himeji Castle, Japan, prompting an update to our LEGO model today. When I visited exactly a year ago, the blossoms were late, allowing me to experience the castle without the usual crowds.
LEGO logic gates: a reliable binary adder
Serendipitously, I discovered a novel LEGO machine designed by Hiro Labo, a professor at a university in Osaka, Japan. This conceptually simple machine reliably performs binary addition on two single-bit numbers, without the excessive joint play and gear backlash I’ve experienced in other designs. Naturally, I had to replicate it: the plates on the left stack to form the adder on the right.