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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.
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.
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.
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."
Somewhere, there are LaserJet IIs still printing.
Not all HP printers are consumer grade junk.
No, it's not a plotter. Plotters are able to move the substrate back and forth underneath the pen. Combined with the left and right motion, a plotter can make a line in any direction on the substrate. "Plotters are restricted to line art," as your wikipedia link says. This can't even do line art. It must rasterize ("pixelize") an image before it can be printed.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
Wonderful. Like angels on an illustrated manuscript.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
My only disappointment is that he used "special pieces." At least, I think a felt-tip and a rubber-band count as those.
Whether it moved the paper or the pen is relatively irrelevant. I think his main point was, plotters universally draw line art (moving the paper, or pen, in a fluid continuous movement along the path you are tracing)... vs. printers which rasterize their image (print dots of colour which merge together to form a complete image).
Although this project rasterized the page (printing dots), it could have just as easily been designed to set the pen down and then do continuous line art... but you have much less software that’s capable of printing to a line art plotter as opposed to a regular raster image printer. That is most likely the reason for the dot-matrix print style that it used.
This really isn’t that impressive. The main point that impresses me is that LEGO products are precision-built with such a quality as to be able to feed paper and move a pen to accurately position the dots and produce what looks like essentially a flawless page of print (albeit slightly low-res because of the relatively large size of the dots). We always knew that LEGO used top-quality materials with very, very small tolerances on the parts... this takes advantage of that and shows just how high their standards are.
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.
I saw it ten goddamn times when I didn't need it.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.