
Working Lego pinball machine built from 15,000 bricks - sohkamyung
https://www.brothers-brick.com/2018/05/09/working-lego-pinball-machine-built-from-15000-bricks-features-benny-in-all-his-classic-space-glory-exclusive-feature/
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klausjensen
Wow. That is truly impressive work of art and engineering. Great work, Bree!

I recently dove back into building a LEGO Technic model, 25 years after last
building anything in LEGO.

It was such a joy and pleasure, and so relaxing to just sit and build while
listening to an audiobook. I highly recommend it to others, who like me, have
a hard time relaxing.

LEGO therapy FTW.

~~~
StavrosK
I'm going to have to try this, and do it old-school. Just sit on the carpet
with the LEGO set in the box and go to town. Thanks for the tip, I still have
all my old bricks neatly categorized in a large container.

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dep_b
Nice. Two of my old fetishes rolled into one. And it does seem to play at
least a somewhat decent game of pinball as well.

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vm
For pure pinball design, the legas dampen the thrash and clang that metal and
hard plastic have... which also make pinball fun.

But that's obviously not the point of the project which is impressive in so
many ways!

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bitwize
Oh my God, and it's themed around Benny the spaceman too!

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carrja99
My seven year old daughter is a lego fanatic, showed this to her this morning
and her eyes glowed. Really fantastic job building this.

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FraKtus
Same here, I showed her the web site, and now she wants to submit her
creation. It's fascinating to see her building a dream house and to see how
she wants to have it. Last time she put a pool close to her bed in her bedroom
:-)

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sandworm101
She isn't a true lego nerd until we hear her opinion on snot. That's big thing
in the lego community. Google it.

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pfarrell
Now this is what I come to HN for.

The video is really worth watching. This work combines design, engineering,
execution, and taste to elevate it to a truly great accomplishment.

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c-smile
At Singularity time "Super AI" will provide us everything people will need for
living. Automated food production, all that. Human will be excluded from
production chain. Communism will come, want we it or not.

And so what 10 billion of us will be doing? Constructing pinball machines from
Lego... and that's in the best case ...

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tonysdg
Someone get this girl a scholarship, stat.

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skookumchuck
I'll never understand the fascination with Legos. I had a Gilbert Erector Set,
which used nuts & bolts and was made of metal, not plastic.

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icebraining
I may be wrong about Erector/Meccano, but it's my understanding that Lego has
a bunch of advanced components (that can be easily interfaced with regular
ones) that those two don't. The obvious one here is the Mindstorms, but even
when I was growing up I enjoyed the air hydraulic system and the electric
powertrain.

Meanwhile, the metal is interesting if you need the strength, but otherwise,
what's the advantage?

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skookumchuck
The Gilbert had an electric motor with various power takeoffs.

There's no doubt that Lego, with their immense popularity, has every
imaginable add-on. But to me, snapping brightly colored plastic bricks
together with plastic wheels just makes plastic toys. It doesn't tickle my
engineering sensibilities, while screwing together girders and brackets and
metal pulleys produce things that look (and behave) like machines.

Granted, putting the tiny nuts on the tiny bolts could be difficult for young
hands, but I got very good at it. These days I see even teenagers who have
problems getting a large nut started on a bolt, and/or have difficulty using a
screwdriver.

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vertex-four
I don't think that creating machines out of metal is inherently "more real
engineering" than creating them out of plastic - both are more-or-less
irrelevant to engineering as a discipline, and it seems that people can build
things of rather incredible complexity in Lego.

Perhaps early familiarity with screws and whatnot might make building shelves
a bit easier, but... frankly speaking, if you can't figure out how to use a
basic set of tools just by looking at them and figuring out which parts fit in
which holes - or figuring out that there might be a video on youtube to
explain how to do whatever you're doing - there's bigger issues than which set
of toys you grew up with. If that's the case, your entire learning environment
from ages 2 to 25 has failed to provide you with the tools to understand how
to gain knowledge, and whether you were provided with Lego or Meccano isn't
going to help you cope with life.

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DanBC
My reply isn't connected to benefits and disadvantages of Lego vs other
construction toys.

> if you can't figure out how to use a basic set of tools just by looking at
> them

Reading the thread[1] about types of screw heads shows that many people don't
in fact understand much about screws.

I'm pretty sure that most (not all!) HN users don't know how to correctly use
different types of screw driver.

And we haven't got to "advanced" stuff like choice of types of washers and
locking mechanisms.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17011388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17011388)

~~~
skookumchuck
It turns out for young hands to be surprisingly difficult to use a
screwdriver. The blade has to be held in the slot without slipping out, a
normal force applied along with a twisting one. After a while one learns to
spin the screwdriver with the fingers while keeping it in the slot.

Not to mention the feel of getting the tiny nut threaded on to begin with.

It takes the kids a while, and they get frustrated. Legos have the appeal that
such skills are not necessary.

