Brickcon 2014

Back to Brickcon!

This time L3-G0 brought a friend, MCK-Y, the Lego Mouse Droid.  We spent so much time running around the hall interacting with the kids and folks that we don't have a lot of photos, but here're some decent ones.

 

L3-G0 and MCK-Y, the Lego R2-D2 astromech and MSE-6 mouse droids.

Above you can see that MCK-Y has some glowing undercarriage LEDs that provide a nice effect, if not canon.  MCK-Y has his own set of bleeps and noises, we'll try to post some video later.  MSE-6 Mouse Droids also go by the name "Baby Box Droid."  Here's a close up of MCK-Y.

 

MCK-Y the Lego MSE-6 Mouse Droid

We Win!

I know we win because I have a picture of the trophy to prove it :)  We one the "Sublime Shape" artistic category in Brickcon 2014.  That's one of the art categories.  We're honored, there are tons of amazing MOC's at Brickcon.  And, as you can see, the trophies themselves are pretty cool.  This is our second trophy, the Lego Disney Wonder won a microscale contest a few years ago.

 

"Sublime Shape" trophy for the Lego Droids, Brickcon 2014

We had a few mishaps, L3-G0's front foot took a beating, I think the hinges are getting looser so it falls apart more readily :(.  MCK-Y is new, so had teething problems.  The light is a battery hog, and his wheels are funny rubber bean bags (Lego tires filled with real beans), which make him have a cute wobble, but also make the wheels fall off.  Definitely need to figure out how to get better wheels in the future.  His wheels are also pinned on with 3 technic pins, so we were able to keep repairing the wheels until the pins actually broke!

Anyway, we'll leave you with a photo of the droids:

Lego R2D2 and Mouse Droids

Front Vents and Dome Ring

The last few days were complicated.

Saturday I took the body to the SEALUG meeting (Seattle Lego Users Group), and it fell apart in the car when I braked for a stop sign. Internally there's some hidden hinges that didn't really have a ton of surface area.  We cleaned up some to make the body sturdier. Now the hinges connect to the body panels with nearly 3 times the surface area. It might still need some glue to be motorized, but it should at least not fall apart.

The front vents weren't done earlier because the hole in the front panel needed to move a little from the original plans. Additionally, LDD let us have some error in the brick attachments that didn't work in the real world.  It took quite a bit of effort to get the panels securely attached. At one point there was a quarter-plate difference in height between the vents and the hole to attach them. I have no clue how to move something 1/4 plate, and it was too loose as it was. I fixed it by making the middle blue stripe slightly wider, it was a single stud (2.5 plates), now it's 3 plates. I also noticed a few missing outline tiles.

 

We also started on the dome ring, which was tricky because the original design had some pretty big flaws. (Lego Digital Designer doesn't really tell you if stuff is structural or not).  The ring portion is complicated because the middle bricks of each section are offset by 1/2 stud to help the illusion of being round.  Complicating matters are a couple slits that go the circumference of the dome, which we did by recessing the plates there by another 1/2 stud.  It took a little work to get everything secure

Time Lapse Youtube Video

The horses get to go on a carousel ride.

L3-G0, the full size Lego R2-D2.

We've made a few Lego models, such as the Lego Disney Wonder cruise ship and a Lego Space Needle, and it's about time to do something new, but all of our ideas were pretty lame.  So in the back of our minds there was some thinking about "what could we build next?" 

Then we went to Emerald City Comicon and saw some of the wonderful Astromechs there.  Of course I wanted to build one, but quickly realized it'd be a ton of effort, cost a lot, and I wasn't terribly familiar with the materials.

It should've been obvious, but "gee, I wanna build a droid" sat in one part of my brain while "I wonder what I'll build next in Lego" sat in another part.  Eventually we came to the obvious conclusion:  "I'll build an L3-G0".  Don't know why it took so long.

Normally I grab a bunch of bricks and start building, then get more bricks, but for various reasons I started toying around with some of the sections in Lego Digital Designer to see if some of my ideas were practical.  Of course, once I started, I forgot to stop.

Now we have a 15,000 piece model pretty much figured out, and all we need are about 12K more bricks!  (Well, and some sort of frame, and some motors, and some electronics).  We're hoping that at least part of L3-G0 will be done for BrickCon in October.  Feel free to send us your spare bricks ;-)

There are some parts that will undoubtedly need changed from the LDD model, and he's going to need an internal frame of aluminum or wood or something, but it should be do-able.

A couple more screenshots of the drawing:

The model is based on plans from the R2-D2 Builder's Club (Astromech.net)  Of course brick isn't as finely detailed as manufactured parts, but he should be "pretty close" to spec.  He'll probably be about 100 pounds.  Eventually we'd like more functionality, but for a start we're looking at getting him to move and beep in time for Emerald City Comicon (ECCC) 2014.  We'd love to take him other places too, anyone know how to get him to Celebration in one piece?

We'll post more as the project goes.

Bricks acquired so far:  15900/16000.