Working Lego pinball machine built from 15,000 bricks | Hacker News Reader

Working Lego pinball machine built from 15,000 bricks

brothers-brick.com

232 pointssohkamyung35 comments

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.

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.

I regularly play LEGO with my two young kids on weekends and it’s so much fun. Sometimes they stop and play something else and I continue to build stuff :) it is great way to relax and spend time with your kids

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.

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!

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

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

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 :-)

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

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.

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 ...

Someone get this girl a scholarship, stat.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

> whether you were provided with Lego or Meccano isn't going to help you cope with life.

That sure escalated quickly :-)

The constraints of a medium are often the appeal. Not to mention, a quick glance over Gilbert stuff and it strikes me as utterly charmless. The global and universal appeal of Lego is clear in comparison.

> utterly charmless

Really? I find them utterly beguiling :-)

http://www.girdersandgears.com/models/hs-stabilstreetcar.htm...

http://www.girdersandgears.com/erector-zeppelin.html

> global ... appeal of Lego

Oh, I know. It just falls flat with me. I'd happily decorate my office with Gilbert constructions like the pictures linked, but never Lego ones.

Oh, man, a 28! I used to take that tram to school.

I'm not trying to "show you wrong" or anything like that (unlike the idiots who downvoted you I have no problem with your preference for Erector), but curiously, the real thing is colorful (and mostly made of wood, not metal): https://oranatravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/tram-28-l...

I love clanky, rattling, screeching, grinding old streetcars, too!

> idiots who downvoted you

No problem with that, I knew I'd be stepping in it to post my distaste for Legos.

I've put together many Lego sets over the years for others who were a bit too young for them, and found them tedious and the results something I'd prefer to discard. A spaceship that looks like a stack of bricks is not appealing, and they'd just fall apart when the kids would try to play with them.

> they'd just fall apart

Agree. I had Meccano sets as a kid - best toy/kit ever! Wish I still had them.

You're overlooking the Technic sets, which let you build real machiney machines. Plastic machines, yes, but working ones; in addition to the motorized vehicles and such (often with things like working gearboxes), back in the 80s, there was a Mindstorms predecessor that let you connect Lego sensors and motors to a box that was controlled by an Apple II computer and write programs in a Logo dialect. (The word "Mindstorms" comes from Seymour Papert, who collaborated with Lego.) Enterprising kids built working, computer-controlled pen plotters, model cranes, mechanical arms, even a replica of the original Logo "turtle" (a wheeled robot with a retractable pen that drew on paper on the floor).

There's like a huge ecosystem for this stuff, and it all interoperates seamlessly with the normal brick Lego pieces.

I see Lego and Meccano as optimizing for different variables: Meccano for verisimilitude, and Lego for ease of assembly and reconfiguration.

And do the mechanisms shown in the linked article not tickle your engineering sensibilities? Because they're made of plastic?

Take a look on YouTube for LEGO GBC (great ball contraption) and you'll see the engineering that goes into some LEGO constructions.

> not tickle

Right.

> Because they're made of plastic?

Yes, but more than that. It's the bright colors and the toyish appearance that is just off-putting.

For comparison, take a tour through the Deutsches Museum in Munich at the industrial machinery on display. Many look like steampunk contraptions, and Gilbert echoes that look. None of them look like Legos.

So it's merely an aesthetic objection you have, as opposed to any real engineering merits LEGO may or may not have? That's fair, you're entitled to your opinion, though I find it to be pretty shallow view to take on the subject of engineering.

It doesn't conform to your cultural views of what "real" engineering is versus mere "toys." Society has taught us that real engineering must be metal and stark, while only children's toys may be colorful.

There is a bit more to it. One quickly learns the basics of triangular truss construction with Gilbert (otherwise your structure folds up), while one pretty much only learns to interlock the bricks with Lego. Bricks neither look nor behave much like machine parts.

> pretty shallow

When your only material is a brick, every construction looks like another brick wall. A locomotive that looks like a stack of bricks doesn't aesthetically appeal to me. (The primary colors of the bricks don't help.) So yah, shallow I am :-)

> One quickly learns the basics of triangular truss construction with Gilbert

If you're building something large with LEGO Technic pieces you will very quickly come to the same conclusions.

> When your only material is a brick

That hasn't been true of LEGO for a very long time. While the individual parts may resemble bricks, I can assure large LEGO constructions (that aren't just sculptures) are not merely stacks of bricks.

I would not call this a mere stack of bricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j90RaW7DLP8

Lego sets are still almost entirely bricks or bricklike pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srv0GZPvTtw

Still look like bricks, too.

Another point is any semi-competent person can fabricate additions to the Gilbert sets with simple tools. Making things that hook up to bricks? Fuggetabootit. You're stuck with what ever Lego makes. Lego is a closed universe, a walled garden.

Eh, that I can't agree with. Bolts and nuts work pretty well on the holes of Technic parts (e.g. http://www.roboscience.co.za/how_to/presentation/index.htm). Plus the LEGO pieces "grab" pretty well, so if you build tightly around the other part, they become well attached. And there's also string, of course.

I remember combining my LEGO builds with other stuff without much difficulty.

Have you ever built a moderately complex piece with LEGO? Or are you just dismissing LEGO for being "brightly coloured" and therefore not engineer-y enough as "metal nuts and bolts" for the sake of being made of metal?

Yes - a couple of the more expensive Star Wars sets and some others.

It was never long before they disintegrated back into bricks and rubble.

I was thinking specifically of Technic pieces, and by "build" I meant design and build it yourself, not build a set. I think you'll find that to be quite the engineering feat, to build something moderately complex.

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