

Lego Calendar - greenburger
http://www.lego-calendar.com/long-description/

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jacquesm
For a while LEGO had 'modulex' and 'plancopy', at least one segment of which
was targeted at lego based planning boards.

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NgBBDpSJ34/SNm7FhCVdNI/AAAAAAAADX...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NgBBDpSJ34/SNm7FhCVdNI/AAAAAAAADXU/unm9aB4gGMQ/s400/6e5f_1.JPG)

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Zikes
Custom pieces could probably also be 3D printed.

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isaacdl
From what I've heard, the tolerances on Lego pieces are very tight. Most
commercially available 3D printers can't yet reach those tolerances, so the
pieces don't fit together very well. Although I guess having a perfect fit
might not matter as much for a project like this vs. a 2 foot wide model of
the Death Star!

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gurvinder
You will soon get a cease and desist letter from Lawyers of Lego for using
their trademark. I am telling from my experience.

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readerrrr
They seem to be doing fine. The oldest discussion was 11 months ago.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lego+calendar#!/story/forever/0/le...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lego+calendar#!/story/forever/0/lego%20calendar)

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duck
The difference is that was just a project to show off, but now they have a
domain and what seems to be plans to market this.

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celticninja
I think they are just going to offer it as open source software be a use you
can get the Lego yourself. The software scans the picture and translates that
to calendar input.

the last line on the post says it is an experiment and not a product.

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btown
Unfortunately, open source vs. commercial has nothing to do with whether
something is a trademark infringement. The countless open-source fanworks
taken down by brand-owning companies are a testament to this. As long as
lawyers believe that "if you don't defend your trademark with takedowns,
you'll lose the ability to defend it in court," then benign derivatives will
not be able to use IP without licensing it in the general case.

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00bemccurrachp
Love the idea, especially it's accessibility. This feels like it would be fast
to manage physically, except for the take-photo-and-email component, which
could be replaced by a webcam pointed at the board. Then there's also no
technical friction fiddling on your phone.

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knes
FYI, This was posted 11 months ago too.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475285)

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jpetersonmn
Looks pretty cool. Few questions.

1) Do you have to give your calendar login to a 3rd party? 2) What happens I
add something to my calendar on my computer, is there some alert sent to
someone that they need to add a lego to the board? 3) What I schedule
something on the calendar online, but the lego doesn't get added to the board.
When someone takes a picture and syncs it, what will happen to my appointment?
Will it think it's gone and erase it? Notify of the descrepency, etc....

I'm envisioning in my head some arduino powered lego calendar that
automatically puts the blocks in place as appointments are added/moved/deleted
from the cloud.

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jthacker
Speculation: It appears they are using this for the overarching structure of
projects. Rather than managing individual appointments it manages overall
time, e.g. on this day BobbySue should be spending 50% of her time on project
A and 50% on project B. Then you can make the calendar read only from the
digital side.

That being said, I would still like to see a pick-n-place managed version of
this that stays in sync with google calendar.

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yzzxy
Although the image recognition software is cool, it's almost surely cheaper to
just set up Mechanical Turk HITs, compared to however many programmer-hours
were spent on the image recognition.

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davtbaum
I'm not sure i agree, I can't imagine it taking more than a solid day of work
prototyping this in OpenCV.

~~~
yzzxy
Well, I'm not an expert by an means but I think the plumbing would take far
more time than the vision itself - hooking up to a calender api, etc. Maybe MT
would run into the same issues. But HITs are super cheap, and a single
programmer-day in many countries would still buy a ton of HITs at a few cents
a pop.

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zheshishei
Can the synchronizer differentiate between single block and double block
heights?

Also, another cool level of granularity (if needed) could be using 1x2 or 1x1
lego blocks to add more information that's easily seen in the photo. Not only
do you have different colors of 1x2 and 1x1 blocks, you can also place them in
different positions (left/right vertically, top/bottom horizontally).

All in all, great idea. I'd like to set one of these up myself in the future.

~~~
pasiaj
I've been playing around with this same kind of idea.

In my case I was using a cheap Android phone as a camera. Color recognition of
1x1 size Legos start to become problematic from more than 2 meters away, even
in good lighting conditions.

~~~
zheshishei
Couldn't it be solved by only taking a picture of the changed columns of the
calendar instead of the entire three months?

I'm not familiar with how you're processing the picture, but it might be
possible to identify the columns by utilizing the empty row at the top of each
column. I count 7 positions/bits. You can use 2 bits to mark the month and the
remaining 5 bits to mark the day of the month. Using this encoding, you could
even add a fourth month without any problems.

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teamonkey
Can anyone explain what hiding blocks in a drawer achieves? I can't work it
out.

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PeterisP
If you remove a blue block of "Blue project" from some day because for some
reason you're doing something else, or are sick or whatever, then you need to
place it somewhere else on the planning calendar, as the expected amount of
work doesn't shrink.

Hiding it in a drawer means that a block of neccesary work has not been
scheduled anywhere and will bite you back later (or you'll do it sometime of
regular hours).

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sygma
I posted this two months ago [0] glad to see it gained traction this time :)

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914768)

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corbett3000
This is so 2012.

