Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
...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.
That will take a CAD drawing and build me a Lego model from it. :p
Remember to maintain your supply of
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
You mean "it's 1,000 times cheaper than inkjet".
I thought it printed LEGO creations from LEGO blocks.
Y’know, your average 3D printer... but with LEGO bricks.
That would be cool.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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. :(
Although he loses some street cred for not using Dogcow Especially since it was used for print dialogs.
The image of the dogcow was used to show the orientation and color of the paper in Mac OS page setup dialog boxes. HCI engineer Annette Wagner made the decision to use the dog from the Cairo font as a starting point for the page graphic. Annette edited the original font and created a larger version with spots more suitable for demonstrating various printing options. The new dog graphic had a more bovine look, making it arguably less clear as to what animal it was intended to be, and after the print dialog was released the name "dogcow" came into use.
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."
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 thought it was a 3D printer that printed LEGO bricks themselves.
Plotters draw vectors. Based on the demo this is pretty clearly raster-based. Don't let the way it holds the ink fool you; it's a printer.
I thought it printed LEGO creations from LEGO blocks.
Y’know, your average 3D printer... but with LEGO bricks.
That would be cool.
I love how a 3D printer is now referred to as "an average 3D printer [no big deal]".
I'm stilled quite fascinated by that technology...
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.
Wow, talk about Epic Fail. The summary even says "with felt tip print head".
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
How many Lego blocks did you use?
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
My only disappointment is that he used "special pieces." At least, I think a felt-tip and a rubber-band count as those.
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
It’s a raster-based printer, which plots (yes) dots. Devices which print by plotting dots are simply called “printers”.
Vs. a line plotter, which is what you are typically referring to when you say “plotter”: some of which are designed exactly like this, with carriages to move the paper and pen. Rather than plotting dots, though, they draw solid lines by moving the pen and/or the paper in solid, continuous movements (only lifting the pen when necessary to break the line and begin a new line somewhere else).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
For what it's worth, here's a video of a LEGO car printer made of LEGO bricks. It's not an arbitrary 3d printer, it just does cars, but you can choose the color of the car.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Well, didn't some of the Technics kits come with different kinds of bands and wheels for them? So that's not too much of a stretch...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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."
Lasers, on the other hand, are rather expensive up front but can run for miles on one tank
Indeed!
:-D
I own a color laser that I got second hand with at least 2 replacement sets of toner for $80. That was three years ago. I still haven't put any of the replacement toner in. I think it's going to last longer than every inkjet I've ever had put together.
The ironic thing is that laser printers are good for people who print infrequently, as the toner doesn't "dry out" due to disuse like ink does. To top it off, ink cartridges are about $50, and toner is about $80.... for 5X the number of pages.
There was a great deal a year ago on these network Lexmarks from PCConnection with high-cap toner installed. $150ish or so. I did the math for a buddy of mine who was looking for a printer at the time on how much the replacement toner would cost an so on.... He bought two of them instead
AC. Stupid mod points.
i hate to say it but building a space station is nothing to boast about.millions of people (including me) made shite lego space stations as a child. on the other hand, desigining a lego printer, then designing a control mechanism to interface to a computer then designing your own printer driver has not been done by too many people.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
I saw it ten goddamn times when I didn't need it.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
A lot of my friends and family laugh at my crazy ideas of using legos as solutions to problems. About 6 months ago I was starting to work on a lego pyramid to house a computer. My GF being thoughtful as she is, ended up buying me the Antec Skeleton case! So no pyramid for me - yet!
But I agree with you, the inherent joy of playing with legos is slowly lost UNLESS you maintain your creativity with them. I've used them for so many random things that people can't help but laugh and then say "yeah, that worked out great" because they're so flexible. Sure my collection is now less than a shoe box and some parts don't quite fit very well together anymore, but it's faster and easier sometimes that getting tools out and cutting materials to size.
Until recently, legos has served as my projector's adjustable base. It not only held the projector on the front of a rack, but also propped it up in place. Now because of where it's used I just built a rig to hold it in place on a shelf (that secures itself). Since I was working with tools already it didn't take much to build it (just a little thinking and measuring). But believe me, if that wasn't the case, the legos would still be under that projector!
Worth mentioning, I always recommend people to buy legos for kids. They're some of the best things one can have to help develop many skills and thinking processes. I always refer to legos being the basis of becoming and engineer.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
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."
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.