
Show HN: Rebrickable - Combine your LEGO sets to create other sets - someotheridiot
http://rebrickable.com/
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iqster
I came across your site a few months ago and thought it was extremely cool.
Great Job! Can you please tell us about your tech stack?

Ultimately, the site didn't solve my problem though, which was to get some
reuse out of my lego collections. But that wasn't a shortcoming of your site
... rather, I concluded that Lego has explicitly designed most of their models
to be "non-reusable". I.e. even though I have about 10 flagship models (all
technic), I don't get 100% completion on any non-trivial set.

As I recall, initially you site didn't have too many MOCs. That might be one
way of solving the problem. Consider a gigantic set like the Unimog ...
listing a bunch of MOCs made solely from this set would address the problem of
reuse.

One more thing ... one of the things I was trying to do using your site was
figure out what sets to buy in order to be able to complete the legendary
"Motorized Bulldozer" set. Your site says ... if you get X, you'll be 97%
complete. if you get Y, you'll be 96.5% complete, etc. That isn't what I
wanted to know. Rather, if you said ... buy X and Y to get 100% completion,
that would solve my problem. In fact, if you provided options with different
combos, that would be even better (due to availability and preferences). E.g.
To get to 100%, buy X and Y, or, buy X and W and K, or, ...

Thanks for creating a great resource for the AFOL community! Good luck!

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someotheridiot
Thanks. Yes unless you have hundreds of sets it appears there is very little
chance of getting a 100% complete build. However, some people would argue this
is a good thing as it forces you to figure out how to get the extra few %
yourself :) I want to add some more functionality here to try and assist
people in finding suitable replacement parts.

As for the MOCs, yes originally it had only a few but now that is
accelerating. There are 34 right now with about 50 more in my backlog. As it
becomes more popular, more people contact me asking to submit their MOCs. I
still need to build the self-submit feature!

The idea of listing sets to buy to reach 100% is a good one. I haven't been
too sure how much people actually find that section useful. The idea in my
mind was "if you buy this set you are effectively getting 2 for 1".

Tech stack: Linux, PostgreSQL, Memcache, PHP with jQuery for front end stuff.
Nothing very fancy but the algorithms have been designed (several times!) to
be very fast.

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someotheridiot
I've spent the last 6 months working on this site which has been a hit with
the lego community, would love to get any and all feedback!

