
Lego printer - ropiku
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY
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RyanMcGreal
I had assumed the link would be about a 3D printer that cranks out lego
pieces.

This is way, way more awesome.

~~~
JeanPierre
Well, why not combine a 3D printer AND lego?

Since I've got a long summer, I'm now really tempted to make a RepRap
(<http://reprap.org/>) with lego like this. Imagine how cool it would be to
show that to kids: A lego-robot making lego!

~~~
hugh3
I've thought about a Lego-building robot made of Lego before, but mostly in
the context of an illustration of why atomic assembly by nanobots is probably
impossible.

I'm thinking specifically of the "sticky fingers" problem, which says that if
something binds strongly enough to an atom to "pick it up" then it's going to
be very difficult to get it to "drop" it again. I imagine you'd have the same
problem with Lego... although at least with Lego you can usually pick a block
up by its sides, which you can't do with atoms.

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eru
> I've thought about a Lego-building robot made of Lego before, but mostly in
> the context of an illustration of why atomic assembly by nanobots is
> probably impossible.

Bacteria are proof that nano-assembly is possible, if you define assembly
broadly enough.

~~~
hugh3
Sure, it's most definitely possible with a limited palette. Anything you can
build out of proteins is easy. Other stuff is either harder or impossible,
which is why I believe that nanotechnology will enable all sorts of great
things, but a "universal assembler" will not be one of them.

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soyelmango
Lego camera, lego router, Google's lego RAID, now a lego printer... no wonder
that it's the best toy ever invented.

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chaosmachine
The minifigs are a great touch. No lego project is truly complete without
them.

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Bjoern
This is just too awesome. Makes me jealous as all my lego went to my cousins
many years ago. :(

Anyone a good idea where you can get cheap lego stuff? (maybe china @ bulk
order?)

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bendtheblock
This isn't really an answer to your question, but my co-founder's brother
works as a designer at Lego HQ in Denmark, where they have a huge warehouse
filled with every block/piece/component in every colour available... That's
what he used to make lego versions of us, which we've used on our website (
<http://wemakewebsites.info/about> ). I'm sure you can get a lot of stuff on
mail order.

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pavel_lishin
God, a warehouse full of lego.

That's what heaven is like.

~~~
megablast
All mixed together. That is what hell is like.

I too was looking forward to a printer that built objects out of lego. Would
be a great project to work on.

Nevertheless, this is great. The printed sheet turned out much better than I
had imagined. Shouldn't be too hard to put in different colour pens.

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ck2
HP needs to make a see-through printer with little animated characters like
that for kids.

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jonah
Rad!

Now he needs to do a color version. Remember pen plotters? They had a carousel
of different colored markers and it'd draw (raster or vector) with one color
and then pickup a different color and output that color. Loved watching those
things work.

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th
This is pretty cool.

I tried to do something similar in high school with some friends. We tried to
make a lego robot that would draw like a hand does (not like a line printer).
The difference in velocity between a drawing and raised marker created too
much error for our robot, but we probably could have fixed this if we had
spent more time tweaking variables.

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werrett
Horseattack's camera work and soundtrack was nearly as kick-arse as the
printer / driver combo.

Edit: The track is a remix of a Christopher & Raphael Just's _Popper_ by
Shinichi Osawa.

The track is on Shinichi Osawa's _Teppan-Yaki: A Collection Of Remixes_ album.
Unfortunately it isn't available in the Australian iTune's store. :(

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kqr2
As mentioned in his notes, there was actually a lego plotter kit, although he
didn't base his project on that.

<http://guide.lugnet.com/set/1092>

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maushu
Why all that circuits? Couldn't he have used mindstorms?

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Sukotto
Presumably for the same reason that some people cook pancakes from scratch
instead of buying a mix. It's more fun for them.

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zwieback
As a HP printer engineer I heartily endorse this project!

