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Hoberman Sphere Building Blocks
jmoyers writes "From the people that brought you the Hoberman Sphere comes the Expandagon Construction System. It allows you to build your own folding structures. "Each building block (called an Expandagon) is made of preassembled parts that allow it to expand and contract. This means that you can build very complex expanding shapes easily, using only a few building blocks."
"
Nothing lasts forever.
Time is always slipping by and I rather spent my 4 hours LEARNING something than waste it in something that is unproductive.
Who knows, maybe the things I learn in that 4 hours may one day, 20 years later, give me an insight that may worth a whole lot more than the 4 hours time I've "invested"?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Then if you put a little more thought into it, you sometimes see interesting ways around the limitations.
Regular solids work well. More complex things don't expand and contract so well.
Unless one puts a little more thought into building them.
If you get the little set, you think, gosh I can make some cool things with the big set. You need the big set to see that you can only build things so large before they just don't work at all.
Until you realize that you've been looking at it wrong.
There are also little playability issues with the extra swivel joints. They are hard to get together.
Sometimes, true.
Sometimes when taking things apart, they come apart in the wrong places.
Only if you're not patient enough.
If you really like construction toys like Lego Technics, assume you'll get 4 to 8 hours of fun out these things. Then it will sit on the shelf.
Then, if you come back and put some more thought into it, you'll get even more fun out of it. Especially if you don't play with it by youself but with a couple of other geeks and/or kids.
The movie was Little Man Tate; Jodie Foster played the boy's mother. The pencil and rubber band structure is based on different principles than Hoberman objects. The pencil and rubber band structure is more closely related to tensegrity structures, which are addressed elsewhere in this discussion.
I'm not sure of the exact year, but it was around 10 years ago that I saw Mr. Hoberman and his spheres on TV, and he had been working on them for some time before that. His stuff is used in Satellite deployment, among other things, due to it's expandability.
It's not simply the unfolding, but the underlying structure that remains strong and rigid underneath. Both a folded and unfolded hoberman sphere are both very strong.
I've never had one, but those things always intrigued me because I thought it was so neat how they could "grow" like they do. I never stopped to analyze the mechanism, however. It's a nifty invention, as we all know, and kudos to them for expanding (yes, a pun) this to other shapes. yee ha!
Insert mind here.
These things are cool, but Legos will always be the best...they've survived longer than all sorts of cool building toys, and they're still going strong. If I had my legos here in my dorm room I would still drag them out from time to time...but I had to leave them at home. D'oh!
:)
People like to talk about how building blocks and things of that sort encourage kids to learn, and so on...sometimes you wonder how much truth there really is in that. If a little kid is creative enough to build lots of stuff from legos, they're probably going to go build things (cities in the dirt, and the like) regardless of whether they have a lego set.
It would be kinda cool to see something like Mindstorms for other building blocks, like these Expandagons...nothing like more expensive toys to play with
These things look kinda like K'Nex on crack...and those things were pretty fun.
I find it interesting that 2 out of the 5 stores you can purchase these things from are Amazon and Etoys, stores that we are "supposed to be boycotting". With the current rate of patent idiocy and general corporate rudeness on the internet, how long before there are no places left for us to buy from because they all inspire moral objections? Just a thought...
God Fucking Damnit
but then we started building things. an hour later, we were very bored: theres not much one can build with the small set, but its a large subset of the set of all things that can be built with them: simple polyhedra. blah.
on the other hand, weve found that those little 'x-connectors' (the orange pieces) can be put together a number of ways, just by themselves, to come up with little nervous-energy trippy toys that are fun to manipulate whilst bored...
my opinion, then: over-rated. sadly. =(
Is it eventually very wise to let kids meddle
with shapeless things that can be converted
into anything? First somebody should make sure
that they work only in three spatial dimensions.
And then there's the name of Dagon, which
children will have to say aloud always when
talking about these objects.
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
Go on - flame me, but I think The Amateur Scientist article series from Scientific American can provide you with more interesting cool things to play with.
Not to mention Klein Bottle.
Regards,
January
P.S. Yes, I used to play with Lego. And chemicals. Rockets. And old radios. Transistors. Repairing things. And so on. Any kind of toy which had screws in it.
"...is made of preassembled parts that allow it to expand and contract. This means that you can build very complex expanding shapes easily, using only a few building blocks."
Sound like any Microsoft products we know of?
Connah
Connah
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
Hoberman Sphere at Liberty Science Center, Jersey City, NJ
The way they came up with this idea was from marshmellows! They just came up with a more technical term and use for them. I bet I could build anything that you can with my marshmellows and a cup of water!
Life comes not from the heart, but from the women around you.
They have them at the Store of Knowledge and similar places.
Basic set is $20... Advanced is 40 and Expert is 60. Here is the product info for the three sets.
I am a coder, not a toy-maker. So if the following suggestsions are dorky to professional toy-makers I apologize.
:)
The following are some toys I would enjoy.
1. Toys that allow me to squish a geometric form into its dual, and back to its dual.
2. Toys that allow me to build viral crystal building blocks, and visualize how viral crystals stack.
3. Toys composed simply of 1 gadget, an octet truss, or an isotropic vector matrix.
http://www.inetarena.com/~pdx4d/ocn/chaos0.html
4. Polyhedron truncation. Things that allow me to make new polyhedron by truncating corners. And then allows me to make new polyhedron by un-truncating corners.
5. Packing toys. i.e., spheres of arbitrary sizes, pyramids of aribitrary sizes, and then a way to contruct convex hull containers of arbitrary interesting shapes. Then I can build the convex hull, throw spheres or pyramids into them, shake them around (thus, applying physical real-life stochastic simulated annealing to find local min bounds), and see what I get.
If any of the above are dorkily impractical toy suggestions, my apologies.
P.S. I know we can write code to simulate all the above. But there is something fun to "touch things with your hands."
Regular solids work well. More complex things don't expand and contract so well.
If you get the little set, you think, gosh I can make some cool things with the big set. You need the big set to see that you can only build things so large before they just don't work at all.
There are also little playability issues with the extra swivel joints. They are hard to get together. Sometimes when taking things apart, they come apart in the wrong places.
If you really like construction toys like Lego Technics, assume you'll get 4 to 8 hours of fun out these things. Then it will sit on the shelf.
What is 4 hours of construction fun worth to you?