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Man Builds 7-foot Grandfather Clock from Lego
Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."
Seems to be /.'ed before the first post even (which I'm sure I'm about to be pipped to).
I remember those awesome lego days of my childhood with huge displays in the big dept stores.... no longer. Seems to be pre-moulded crap these days. Good on him.
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
I'd love to know when the kit for this goes on sale. Of all the large-scale Lego designs I've seen, just once I'd like someone to start selling a kit or at least instructions to built it yourself.
.. or so it seems. that poor little server!
before it started to fail though, I noticed the escapement violates the retentive geek's rules on colour matching in lego construction. Just because it's hidden doesn't mean you can just bodge it together out of mismatched pieces, you know.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Yeah, the guy has mad skillz. And it must have taken quite a bit of patience and determination to make the thing. I'm reminded somewhat of Robert Lang's Black Forest Clock, folded from a single sheet of paper.
(Caveat: Does not keep time. Void where prohibited.)
I wonder how accurate this thing is. I mean, with gears and such made entirely of legos, how much play does the gear system have? (i.e. how well do the gears fit together?) Does this guy have any expertise in, well, whatever area of expertise it is that would make you good at making gears with the right ratios to properly keep time? I wouldn't expect much, but if it's accurate within, say, 5 minutes in a 24 hour period, I'd be pretty impressed.
As a kid that spent the few remaining hours that I WASN'T in front of the Commodore 64 digging through his boxes of Legos for juuuuust the right part... I gotta give this guy some serious credit.
:) )
Now I have a feeling that this guy's wife/girlfriend is probably quite worried about him..... or angry at him... (and no, I will NOT be one of those that insists the guy must have no life simply because he has some rather intense hobbies.)
Any chance he can post a howto, schematics, etc? The next generation of Lego enthusiasts is waiting to be inspired! (oh yeah, and I'd like to know how he did it myself
On that note, anyone know of any good websites featuring fun Lego projects such as this?
I hope the land around you yields, a crop like all the other fields, and then your waiting might make sense...
That is by far the best use of legos I've ever seen. I wish I had enough gears in the bins I have tucked away to do something elaboratively creative with that. Though I bet once you get too many in sequence the gears would require more torque than the lego housings can resist.
Just finishing up my end of semester projects, had to analyze several CPUs I designed this semester. One very simple one used 1048 logic cells, but could do integer arithmetic, jumps, branches, and memory operations. Not quite sure how many transistors that translates too, but normally an FPGA cell is a binary operation. Removing several of the odd arithmetic operations would lower that size quite a bit more. I also designed a 5 stage pipelined CPU with 32 word instruction cache, and 32 word data cache in about 2300 logic cells.
When the first vacuum tube based computers were invented, I'll built the designers felt like they were implementing a CPU of this size in Legos. It seems funny now, but this analogy probably holds a lot of water.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
He recently "discovered" a new type of lego brick which allowed a vast improvement in the mechanism. The update is dated 12 March 2003, the original dating from 20 January 2000.
For those of us who work with supercomputers, it still means that. And "how much more power do we need" and "how much cooling do we need" and "there are how-many-thousnad-ethernet-cables?"
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Actually, in the comp sci building at stanford they have the original server that Google ran on, and the case was built out of lego.
IIRC, though, they used the large bricks intended for younger children.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
The "Lego Thing" is that you have a limited set of basic, standardized componants. Everyone's legos are the same but they can be used to make a nearly infinite set of creations. And with a little knowledge of good engineering practices you can create suprisingly solid constructions.
It combines the thrill of making something out of the smallest possible componants that you get from writing a program in assembly with the child-like simplicity of the building material. You have a system of construction that even the smallest child can use that is also capable of some rather complex creations.
That's the ideal anyway, in practice there are a good number of specialised componants. (Like the Mindstorms brick.)
"There is no way that keeps time accurately or is even remotely reliable. "
Why not? Reliable you could debate, but if he can get the gear-ratio correct why wouldn't it be accurate? Properly adjusted, Pendulums are accurate no matter what you make them out of. Are you suggesting the gears will skip or break? Lego gears certainly aren't the strongest gears on the planet but they'll take more than this clock with throw at them in normal opperation.
Heck, with the quality of many consumer goods nowadays there are probably store-bought pendulum clocks with crappier gears than that.
Mini-ITX, a 20GB drive and no other devices. The box is build around the components. No extra space wasted :)
It's quite expandable. (Except that in Norway Lego is more expensive than to hire a metal worker from Poland full time in case you need him to build you a bigger pc-case)
Espen Arnesen
Insert `fortune -o` here
I don't think he tried out for the "master builder" He has done some contract work for Lego, and I think he is quite happy to be freelance. I think he actually gets more exposure on his own than he would as a Lego employee.
The clock is a few years old. Erik "used to be" a programmer, but now considers himself a full-time lego builder. He is also a champion scrabble player.
Overall, a geek of geeks, right at home on slashdot. Once the server his server has cooled down, make sure you take a look over his full portfolio.
And I would really like that desk. I think that is what put him from "Lego hobbyist" to "profitable Lego artist".
Looks like we broke the mirrors too. 35 years bad luck. There'll be no escapement for the princess this time.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
LEGOs would give me an advantage. My craftsmanship isn't all that great, meaning it's "measure twice, cut three times," for me.
Having uniform building blocks really helps.
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