Some bits of L3-G0's Innards

I was poking around looking for some of my pictures to show off and couldn't find them, so I've uploaded them to an album on Flickr... 

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

People have asked several times how we transport L3-G0.  It's actually really, really easy.

Many MOCs (My Own Creations) are fairly fragile.  I was terrified of figuring out how to move L3-G0 and that was in fact one of my first experiments.  I had tons of bungees and other stuff ready to move, plans for a plywood base and all sorts of stuff.  Moving the Lego Space Needle is pretty challenging.  I feel happy that it only takes 1/2 hour (usually) to get it back together now.  That's only 4500 bricks.  L3-G0 is closer to 16,000 bricks!  So I figured it'd be harder.

He's only 60-65 pounds or so (almost 30kg), so unlike many other R2-D2 builds he's not too hard to lift.

The first part is to take off his head (remembering to unplug the wire helps) and stick it on the car seat, careful of the holoprojectors.  I put the seat back up as far as possible, but don't really worry about strapping it in or anything.

 

Then we pick up L3-G0's body and put it in back.  The front foot shell comes off and the casters get shoved in around the rear seat's mounting point.  Hooking the bungee around the top of the foot is about the only hard part since the hooks don't have much room on the mounting point.

 

 

And then last is to merely hook the back seat belts around the central foot guide post, pulling them to ratchet tight (like you would a child seat).  Again, watch the wire on the top.

The sad thing is that getting the bungee is sometimes tricky, and the last step, the seatbelts, is so simple, that I've forgotten about the seatbelts about three times already.  Fortunately the last two times I caught myself, but on the way to Hosik's science fair we were late & rushing, so I drove down the driveway with them off.  I was reminded to fix it when L3-G0 fell over on his face.  Fortunately it didn't do much damage.

Anyway, once he's secured, the model's ridiculously stable.  It barely moves and I don't need to be nearly as careful driving as with the other models.  (The Space Needle wants the sections I divide it into to fall apart, and the Lego Disney Wonder's nice wooden platform has slippery velvet on it, so it wants to slide around.  The worst part for L3-G0 is putting the front shell back together.

Latest Video

Still needs legs and a few other details, but lights and sound are working now!  He went on another test run at work (Microsoft Building 50).  Afterward we took a spin through the café where he got quite a few pictures taken.

Latest video:

Sealug Meeting

L3-G0's not done yet, but he's getting there!  We went on a test run to the Sealug meeting, which was held at ECCC's headquarters.  The kids loved chasing around a life size R2-D2 and were willing to look past his partially completed state.

He's obviously missing his legs/shoulders, skirt, front foot skin and a few other details, but I wanted to test transporting him and see what problems I might encounter, and where he might fall to pieces.  I don't want to be spending all of Emerald City Comicon fixing him!  Sounds are also still on a random loop, and he has no dome LEDs at the moment (which means he can spin his head a ton).

I have some video of his outing, the meeting starts about 40 seconds into the clip.  I took a week off work to make a big push to get him from frame to nearly complete:


I didn't think I was going to get the dome reattached before the meeting, but Lara prodded me and it was mostly reconnected just in time (I was a few minutes late).

The test outing was a great success, we learned tons that we'll need to know for ECCC later in the month:

• He does great with his new shoulders in the car.  Tying down's going to be tricky when the front foot cover gets on, but otherwise much more stable than when I took the frame to work.
• The new shoulders (laminated plywood) seem to be doing OK.  Since he has 4 wheels in each foot, there's a lot of stress when he turns because some of the wheels have to slip.  That pretty much destroyed the old thinner shoulder hub.  I'd expected to need aluminum, but the plywood's doing OK.
• On a related note, when turning hard, the feet can chatter a lot, enough to knock off the battery box (at 60 seconds in the clip one of them is missing).  The outer foot panels chatter too.
• He can spin his head fast enough to throw off a holoprojector, which happens at about 1:20 in the video.
• With the throttle limit off on the motors he has pretty much a perfect amount of power, much faster than walking, but not so quick as to be uncontrollable or unrealistic.  (My previous outing was limiting the motor controllers and he was just under walking speed).
• He looks funny without shoulders :)
• The vibration from pavement or even a sidewalk is a bit scary, he knocked a couple dome panels loose that way.
• The body held up really well.
• L3-G0 knew to expect rain in Seattle, but it started to snow at the end!

We still have a ton to do before ECCC, crossing my fingers that we can get it all done!  L3-G0 will be in "Brick Nation" at ECCC, the biggest Lego display yet at Emerald City Comicon.  Ground floor of The Conference Center building.