R2-D2 in Star Trek Redshirt Costume

Well, L3-G0 decided to crash a Star Trek convention.  And, of course if you're gonna mix canons like that, your gonna need a costume:


Lego R2-D2 wearing Star Trek Redshirt

Our daughter has been collecting signatures, so we wanted to see some of the stars, and Lara thought it would be a good idea to bring L3-G0.  I wasn't so sure, but she had the idea for the red shirt.  Of course we put off actually making the costume 'til the last minute.  Anyway it turned out pretty fun.

Artoo wasn't the only cosplayer there:


R2-D2 with Star Trek Cosplay

Of course, there were scarier things than Klingons:


Borg with Artoo Red Shirt

Artoo did get to meet some of the Star Trek talent.  Some of them left early and missed him, but Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby and John De Lancie all got a chance to say hi to him.  They also had some talks that were pretty enjoyable with funny anecdotes, their an entertaining crowd.  (I guess that's their job.)

Marina was really funny.  She saw R2 in his red shirt and whipped out her phone... a Blackberry... asking if she could tweet a picture.  There was lots of tapping and phone wrangling, but finally she held it out to take a picture... Whoops, another one... And another.  Finally she apparently has a picture and taps a bunch more (all the while insisting she loves her Blackberry).  Viola, she announces that she's done it and posted the pix to twitter.

Curious about this 5 minute picture taking of course I check twitter when we move on:

The universes collide!!!! R2D2 in a starfleet shirt!!!
— Marina Sirtis (@Marina_Sirtis) December 14, 2014

Hilarious, all that and no photo :)

Later in the day the talent had no visitors, so we went back and let her know about the faux pas.  It didn't take as long this time:

OK OK I know I'm dumb. Here's the pic of R2D2 pic.twitter.com/PPiGFOHRoT
— Marina Sirtis (@Marina_Sirtis) December 15, 2014

I know she likes that phone, but maybe she wants one with a better camera, just sayin'.  Anyway, thanks a ton to Marina for providing us with such a fun story and memories.

Another hilarious bit was when the talent first arrived.  Apparently they had been told to bring photos, but Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes apparently hadn't been listening.  Marina was like "men".  Brent was griping and grouching, digging around his bag and pulled out the only shot he could find, all bent and torn, turning around and asking the fans if they'd buy that.  (Someone did scrounge up some stills for them eventually.)

In short, we had as much fun as Lara predicted, and he was better received than I expected, considering that we had the wrong genre.  I guess we're all just geeks. 



L3-G0 (in costume) saying hi to famous people

Star Wars Day, May the 4th be With You!

(General L3-G0 Video is at http://youtube.com/myL3G0 if you are just looking for Lego R2D2 videos)

@()$*&)(*& Sandpeople!



L3-G0 faceplant, @#$_()* Sandpeople!

I was running a little bit late, so I let us be a little rushed and didn't watch for sidewalk cracks close enough (I even thought about it and figured the 2 I could see were OK so the 3rd was probably good), and L3-G0's body tripped as I was trying to get it out of the slight drizzle. 

His right shoulder got mangled again, and one of the front panels screws got pulled out.  A few bricks were scratched or dented and I'll probably replace them.

On the plus side, I don't think I have another picture of the bottom of his feet, and from the label I can now clearly tell which one is the Right Foot!  (As if I didn't know).

Fortunately the 501st was there, though where an Imperial learned to repair Lego Astromechs is beyond me.



L3-G0 the Lego R2-D2 and a 501st Jawa

501st trying to repair L3-G0 the Lego R2D2

Unfortunately he missed the group photo while I put his shoulder back together, but I got a couple more photos with the 501st.

L3-G0 the Lego R2D2 with some of the 501st

L3-G0 considering a Tuskan Raider

Probably even more dangerous than the face plant was a run-in with a Sarlacc, I mean Gus Lopez, a Star Wars... collector!  Fortunately the endorphin rush Gus got from bagging a stuffed Bantha allowed L3-G0 to slip away...


No Gus, you may not collect L3-G0 the Lego R2-D2 :)

(I'm not quite sure what's up with the pigeon-toed Sandtrooper, I guess he's still looking for the right droids :-)

 

After going back home (and finding my daughter who managed to vanish) we went back out to the mall for a few minutes.  Apparently the Minifig he bought at Comicon wasn't enough for him.

 

First stop was to check out the Lego store. I tried explaining the birds and the bees, but apparently I didn't make the right beeps and whistles, so L3-G0's still trying to figure out where he came from.

L3-G0, the Lego R2-D2 trying to figure out from whence he came

After my earlier wipe out (and random stranger kids wonder why we don't let them at the remote control), my daughter insisted that she be the one with the controls.  I'm not quite sure if it was her or L3-G0 that wanted to look at XBox One games...



L3-G0 the Lego R2D2 perusing a shelf of XBox One games

 Since it was Star Wars Day, we ran into the obligatory Princess Leia hairdo of course!


L3-G0 with a fan on Star Wars Day

And as if L3-G0's ''where did I come from?" question wasn't confusing enough already, we ended up at the Disney store.  (Looking for one of those Banthas Gus had showed us.)  Everyone there learned that, in addition to several Star Wars classics, L3-G0 already knows the Disney production logo theme "When You Wish Upon a Star" as well as "Let it Go".


L3-G0 at the local Disney Store



 Anyway, that was L3-G0's Star Wars Day, May the 4th be With You!

Group photo at ECCC

Photo of L3-G0 with other R2 Builders Club astromechs here at ECCC.

It was great finally meeting other club members up here.

Brickcon 2013 L3-G0 Setup

L3-G0 Made it to Brickcon!!!

Whew, that was way more complicated that I expected.  Especially since the new! lights blew up at 1:30 AM. 

But he made it, here's a quick clip of L3-G0 doing his thing and some of the other MOCs at Brickcon 2013 (Oct 6/7).

 

Robotics

Right now L3-G0 is using FOUR computers:

 

• Perhaps counterintuitively, a Lego EV3 Mindstorms to make his head spin
• An Arduino for the blinking lights.
• A Microsoft Surface for the sound effects (looping audio track)
• And a Surface Pro that programmed the Arduino and the EV3, at the moment needed to trigger the EV3 (start button's buried), and was using it to tune the dome program for the conference today and tomorrow.

Building on Day 4 - Starting the Body!

The parts we needed for the body arrived!!!  We're still waiting on ~1500 of the original ordered parts (a little bit of rework has caused us to order a little more since then).  So there're still some gaps for parts.  Considering it's 15K+ parts, we've done great missing 10% of the bricks!

The body is 12 panels, and I started on six of the easiest.  Mostly because they're either identical pairs or mirrors.  So that's about half of the body!  (just the easy half).  3 of them are contiguous, the next two holes in this photo need an additional panel, and the last two go next to each other (despite the gap in the photo).  You can see the missing bricks :(

 



Three are next to each other, so we can see how they fit.  If you can get over the missing bricks, you can get an idea of the 3-D detail.  I'll probably take some close ups when we get the other bricks filled in.

And an idea of the scale, Lara posing with the partial body.

 

Time lapse video for day 4

(All 3 cats interrupted the video, they like playing with the loose bricks.  Additionally there's.... horses?)

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.