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The Genius of the Lego Printer
Barence writes "If you've ever struggled to build anything more complex than a cube of Lego, this will blow your mind. It's a fully functioning Lego printer, complete with felt tip print head."
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...but is there a Linux driver?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Stop linking to websites that link to the actual fucking article: http://www.b3ta.com/links/Lego_printer
Also, this is just a more advanced variation of a project included with the original Lego Mindstorms kit.
P.S.: fucking Flash used for video again. Lame.
When I saw this headline, I thought it printed on to lego blocks forming words using lego blocks
That will take a CAD drawing and build me a Lego model from it. :p
Remember to maintain your supply of
I somehow thought that a "Lego printer" was a device to create an image of what you print using Lego cubes. So, as amazing as the thing is, I felt a bit disappointed.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I clicked on the article, excited to see a 3D printer that printed out complete Lego models. Talk about a let-down.
I'm guessing it takes one new felt tip pen per page, seeing how often it hits the page.
It's always freakin' Windows or Linux for these crazy projects, so bonus points for making the whole thing run on a Mac, as an OS-level printer driver too.
Let's improve on this by adding a fine point marker! :)
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
I bet this is more reliable than any printer HP ever put out. I'm certain the cost of ink is cheaper.
Love all the little minifigs scattered around the machine.
Not a typewriter
... I wanted to cry
P0N!3s!!!
Not A Sig
The little guys riding on it just top it off perfectly. I'm reminded of the rickety dumb erector set models I made as a kid with an instruction manual. :(
1. Multiple colors via a pen carousel and switching mechanism.
2. Support for plotting in addition to line-by-line output.
3. Halftone dithering.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's a plotter not a printer.
Actually, it is a pen plotter, not a printer. It's a technology that was very common in architectural and engineering offices until it rapidly died off 10 years ago for inkjets.
I love the Lego figures going along for a ride.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I have built a similar device from a kit called "Merkur" more than 20 years ago.
A video of merkur alfi in action.
I give it more credit for artistic value with the figures placed around than for the technical difficulties.
I built a plotter capable of those drawings for my 2nd year engineering class using a few stepper motors, a bunch of paint stirrer sticks, epoxy and an AVR microcontroller.
I much prefer the Lego Car factory way cooler IMHO than some paper and a coloured pen.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
f*cking awesome!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
We finally get some *real* "News for Nerds"!
That's really awesome.
During my PhD work, we built some lab gear, for example an overhead shaker, from Lego Mindstorm gear. Pure nerd fun. Had to hide the stuff when the prof showed the lab to guests, though...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If you've ever struggled to build anything more complex than a cube of Lego, this will blow your mind. It's a fully functioning Lego printer, complete with felt tip print head.
On one hand, that's very cool.
On the other hand, though (and on second thought), I just don't see the big deal - I don't see why I should get excited about this.
Back when I was young, I had lots of LEGO, and I played with it every day. I used to build things I liked; space ships, space stations (yes, I was mostly into the Space sets - I basically grew up on Classic Space at first and Futuron later on, and I made it all the way to Blacktron I and II, Space Police and M-Tron), but also houses, cities, castles, and so on.
I created worlds, I played with tme - in them, really -, and I had fun, tons of fun, a kind of fun that I've never really been able to recreate anymore since I've turned an adult.
I don't want to diss LEGO printers, or the people who build them. But at the same time, I just can't get excited about them; they're a perfect example "adult toys". It's a neat application of LEGO, and it shows again what you can do with the stuff, but the magic that was (is) inherent in any child's creations, even my own, isn't there. Fact is, it's not even intended to be there.
I'm sorry, I just can't get excited over this. When somebody creates a cool LEGO space ship or space station or so, though, be sure to post a Slashdot story about it. ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYw2ewoO6c4
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
Analog plotters were at one time common items in engineering labs, as well as chemistry labs where they served as output devices for chromatographs, spectrometers, etc. HP pretty much owned the market, and they moved an overhead pen over a stationary sheet of paper, which was held down to the bed by an electrostatic charge. A typical unit shown here:
http://www.teknetelectronics.com/Search.asp?p_ID=12956&pDo=DETAIL
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
There's a similar lego plotter in this book: http://www.clarkonline.org/william/mapyor/index.html
The book describes using some large lego wheels to form a drum around which the paper was attached, and how to form a small electro magnet around a bolt through a technic lego plate to pull the pen towards the drum. The pen itself was suspended between two lego axles on a butterfly pin. The whole magnet head assembly could pinion left and right using an improvised lego rotary counter to measure progress with a similar block to rotate the drum.
I had the Sinclair Spectrum version of the book as a child and an IO box of relays. I never made the printer, but made lots of other devices.
There's some inside pictures of the book here: http://www.hexapodrobot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=318
A PDF of the book is here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=2000479
-- Mike
is if someone figures out a way to literally print out a lego(like my idealistic mindset first thought when reading the article) which could then of course lead to people printing out all of their manufactured goods.
The actual LEGO construction is _not_ the impressive part here. I built something quite similar 5+ years ago. Many people did. They gave instructions for how to build it in the LEGO Mindstorms Ultimate Builders Set. And there were a huge number of alternatives built as well, to be more accurate or to print on different paper or just built differently. The impressive part of this is all in software. Never seen anything like that before.
One time I made a perpetual motion machine car with Legos. Unfortunately, it rolled off a table and broke. :-(
I never could get it right again, but I swear it happened!
I want a lego tattoo printer
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/lego-powered-bluetooth-printer/
I remember being awestruck seeing a picture of a Lego plotter machine many years ago. It turns out that it was build by Larry Page of Google fame.
Here's a picture of it
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Considering this is slashdot, who the hell struggles with Lego? Hell, I'm pretty sure a substantial ammount of users here use (or have used) Mindstorms extensively..
How much is the ink?
OMG Ponies!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I saw it ten goddamn times when I didn't need it.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
(before the invention of youtube)
http://lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/legoplot.php3
Office: "Hey whats the deal? Aren't you coming into work today?"
You: "Yeah I'm running a little late, one of my printer guys broke a leg."
Office: "What?"
You: "The guys that pilot the lego airship I use to print documents... one of them broke a leg. In fact it snapped clean off and flew quite a ways."
Office: "Maybe you should stay home today."
Seen Lego creations just like this before.
Not genius - not even creative.
Way back before this one, Google's founder built a Lego printer (line plotter) at the university of Michigan:
http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry
Enjoy
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Isn't that actually a Lego plotter?
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but the fact that a generation or two of kids have been brought up on Lego is partly responsible for a decline (in the West at least) in people interested in engineering as a career, and in a general lack of public understanding (and even revulsion) at engineering.
Lego was introduced as a constructional toy for model brick buildings. It replaced stuff like Bayko and Betta-Builder. With Betta-Builder (I may have that name wrong) you glued little bricks together with water-soluble glue; Lego was its less-messy replacement.
The dominant mechanical construction toy of the time was Meccano which had an awsome arrray of components (machine-cut brass gears for example), far more than it has had in recent years. Meccano was true miniature mechanical engineering; you construct Meccano on the same principles as a full size project. I am a professional engineer and have seen Meccano used to demonstate real-life mechanical and structural engineering concepts; eg I know that some of the buffers you see at railway termini were first modelled with Meccano. A plotter-printer would be well within its stride.
But somehow Lego went from a masonry toy to ousting Meccano as the leading constructional toy of any kind, with the introduction of rather crude and weak plastic shafts and gears. A Lego mechanism is not however representative of how you would design a mechanism for production.
Lego is however colourful, has no sharp edges, is not made of nasty steel, and above all you cannot see any nuts and bolts - supposedly the greatest design gaffe of the modern age - OMG.
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I'm still using a 15+ year old DECLaser 5100 which has the same Canon EX engine as the LaserJet 4 had, and it's still going strong. Those Canon engines are durable.