Tripedal wiggle-walking; a study

Behold: The SwashBot! (via)

It's based around swashplate-type linkages, and it's another fine CrabFu product (previously). It's not as steam-y or track-y as CrabFu's usual products, and it's also not yet mentioned on the CrabFu site.

(UPDATE: Now it is!)

That cat's clearly dealt with things a lot scarier than this.

(See also.)

Posted in Hacks, Toys. 3 Comments »

The Acme 18-Servo Hexapodal Cat-Frightener

Phoenix is the winner of the Trossen Robotics TRC Project Contest...

...and deservedly so.

She's a little small to really conquer the indoor environment, but the design is very scalable; I think a double-size Phoenix made with super-torque standard-sized servos or the big quarter-scale ones could scuttle up ordinary stairs quite easily.

(One could, in fact, be climbing your stairs right now. What was that noise?)

More at the forum thread.

(Via.)

[UPDATE: It's now available as a kit!]

None of these minifigs are smiling

Abhorrent Lego entity

This is just one of numerous Giger/Matrix/Lovecraft things from Lego's upcoming series, tentatively titled "Mummy, why is sleep now all teeth and bones?"

(Actually the Black Fantasy Contest on the Classic-Space forums.)

My robot army grows

The Tyco N.S.E.C.T. Robotic Attack Creature comes - or came, since it's now discontinued - in two colours, and two frequencies.

Two Tyco N.S.E.C.T.s

Oh. Yeah.

I am, I assure you, perfectly aware that I am now required to make them fight.

I will do so, and of course make video of the result available to you, as soon as I find another radio-control warrior worthy of me.

(The real problem is getting copyright clearance for the only possible soundtrack.)

The Six Ugliest Space Lego Sets

I'm sure every kid who, like me, spent hours on end poring over Lego (or Meccano) catalogues, was not doing so in simple appreciation of the masterful design that went into the models.

No - we were looking at the parts. Looking, and evaluating.

"It's five more dollars for this spaceship over that one, but you get a big engine cone instead of the medium size, and one of the cool new blue spacemen instead of just another red one..."

And so on.

I developed a great enthusiasm for Technic Lego as well, but Space was my first love. And it had some weird sets.

Every now and then there'd be something that was just so super-cool that the parts in it hardly mattered, seeing as you never took it apart. The Tri-Star Voyager qualified in that category for me, and the old Space Shuttle (less confusingly called the Two-Man Scooter outside the USA) was a contender too.

The real entertainment was to be had at the other end of the aesthetic scale, though.

Sets that you built, looked at, said "I'm eight, and even my spaceships look better than that", and dismantled at once, lest their ugliness prove to be contagious.

Let's kick off with Space Lego's greatest miss from 1985, the unmentionable, or at least un-named, set 1968...

Lego set 1968

...which was apparently built from the wreckage of one or two crashed Gamma-V Laser Craft (which look completely fantastic; my Gamma-V was another of my never-taken-apart models).

Lego Interplanetary Shuttle

And then there's this, the Interplanetary Shuttle. It's apparently a mail delivery vehicle... with a control panel in front of the driver, facing away from him.

Different Space series had a whole genre of funny looking little robots, the king of which was the mighty 6951 Robot Command Center.

Lego Robot Command Center

The Robot Command Center is the only one on this list that I actually owned - because as a parts pack, it was superb.

As a model, though, it was atrocious. It was not only bizarrely misshapen; it also had things on it that didn't even make sense.

Those big blue double-canopy jaw things on the side were the most obvious. I suppose the grabber arms were meant to lob rocks into them or something.

(I used them as prison cells, and as spaceship canopies for ships flown by robots, who had no need for anything as primitive as looking out the window.)

More subtle were the finned rocket cylinders embedded, for no clear reason, in the Robot Command Center's ankles, just above the skid-jets (borrowed from a more sensible vehicle) on which it, presumably very unsteadily, skated across the landscape.

(Completely embedded rocket parts were unusual, but Lego made a habit of putting rockets on ground vehicles. OK, perhaps the nozzles on this dude's classic Shovel Buggy are actually a horn that plays The Yellow Rose of Texas, but I doubt it. I mean, that wouldn't work in a vacuum, would it?)

The Robot Command Center spawned some more Big Ugly Robots. 1994's Robo Guardian was a notable example...

Lego Robo Guardian

...with a total of ten wheels, four of which were unable to touch the ground.

(Did they at least touch the other wheels, and so rotate in the opposite direction? Surely they weren't just hanging there...)

But unquestionably the Ugliest of the Big Ugly Robots hit the market three years later.

I present, with pride, the Robo Stalker.

Lego Robo Stalker

Egad.

But wait, there's one more.

One very special, very rare, very ugly spaceship.

Even most real Space Lego enthusiasts have never seen one of these in the flesh, because it was only available, in 1983, as a special promotion with (of all things) Persil laundry detergent. Well, that was the deal for the UK version of the set, anyway - it was apparently available in other countries with some similar deal.

On the plus side, you didn't have to send in any box tops - though you did have to send in £9.95, which is more than £24, about $US50, in today's money.

Lego set 1593

Behold - Set 1593!

(This is another one, like #1968, which has a set number but no name.)

Once you've finished wondering how drunk these little Lego men were when they decided to be seen in this thing, I really must insist you check out the full-size original image on the Lugnet site here, because this baby's just full of entertaining details.

The cockpit, for a start, has holes in it. Not just the ones you can see above the wing - there are two more on the sides below the wing, and one more gaping hole on the front of the cockpit under the wing. So it looks as if these little guys are going to have to keep their helmets on for the entirety of their mission. And they'd better watch out for space-birds.

Set 1593 also features two big main engines mounted on 2x2x2x2 brackets, which are flimsily attached to one-stud-wide rails. And there are ladder/grille pieces (radiators?) hanging down off the body in four places.

And, the finishing touch: On the top of the nose of the ship, directly behind the big skeletonised dish, is a two by two turntable.

With nothing on it.

It's just a little bit on the front of the ship that can turn round and round.

(Oh, and behind the front dish on the underside of the ship is what every sane Lego kid agreed was a dual laser gun... pointing backwards, at the pilot, through that hole in the front of the cockpit.)

As far as play value goes, this set is decent. That top-heavy land-crawler thing hooks onto the back of the ship (which doesn't make it look much better...), and there's a sort of base-station... cupboard... contraption, and various accessories.

But boy, is it ugly.

To make things even weirder, set 1593 apparently contains all of the parts from the perfectly decent 6880 Surface Explorer and the classic, Concorde-ish 6929 Starfleet Voyager. It would appear the latter crashed into the former at full speed, and 1593 - with its very own box and instructions - was the result.

But, as with every other one of these sets, you can always break it down for parts. And maybe build yourself a Surface Explorer and a Starfleet Voyager.

It's not as if even the ugliest of Lego sets is a stupid Death Star that turns into a giant Darth Vader robot for no reason at all. Any Lego set can be reassembled at will into whatever you want.

Which could be why they're still around, after fifty years.

The area under the curve is the hours...

I am not sure whether Neatorama's recent post actually does immortalise the 10 Most Difficult to Read Tokyoflash Watches, but it's got to be pretty close.

There are hordes of those things, each cooler-looking and less legible than the last. But I suppose this is just the harmless perversity that afflicts all obsolescent products. For years it's been possible to buy a $5 quartz watch that keeps time better than a $3000 Rolex Oyster, and almost nobody with a mobile phone needs a wristwatch at all any more. So, today, practicality is ruled out from the very start as a reason for almost anyone to purchase a wristwatch.

Anybody who wants to make expensive wind-up watches today, therefore, has to add more complications and curlicues to get attention. And anybody selling expensive quartz watches has to turn them into sci-fi escapees.

(By the way, The Secret Life of Machines has an excellent episode on quartz watches, and their forebears.)

Close-up

See also.

Beats the hell out of making Audis

The Mana Energy Potion Robopult is purest genius.

It's not the most straightforward, or mechanically efficient, way of achieving the same feat; it wouldn't even beat the human-powered punkin' chunkers. But point-and-click aiming for a trebuchet-type flinger (actually, this is more of a staff sling) is still a pretty nifty achievement.

More information, and one much more disgusting video (which is also rather surreal, thanks to inspired costume choices), at the Mana site.

ABS slushboxes

Thanks to Ole Kirk Christiansen's disturbingly compelling TechnicBRICKs blog, I now know that a Lego automatic transmission can be surprisingly simple.

I've seen outrageously bulky and complex variable-ratio Lego transmissions before, but this one...

...is pretty much pocket-sized.

It's actually a continuously variable transmission (based on differentials rather than the belts often found in full-scale designs), not a conventional auto with a small integer number of ratios.

But don't worry, there are plenty of separate-ratio autos, too:

Check out the TechnicBRICKs post for more videos and pointers to further info.