Brickify turns your images into LEGO plans | Hacker News Reader

Brickify turns your images into LEGO plans

brickify.com

42 pointscommondream27 comments

How cool would it be if you could submit an image and get a box delivered containing all of the bricks to assemble your Brickified image along with a nice printout of the plan.

Would make quite a nice present (especially for people into things like jigsaw puzzles).

We couldn't figure out how to make it happen, but I agree, that would be awesome!

I'm tempted to try and build a robot (using Lego, obviously) that will count out the necessary bricks into a box :-)

We tried hard to link into the store and it was impossible :( It's like LEGO hates the web. Sigh.

I'm sending this along to our friends at LEGO (the ones who brought our Hack Club NY to life). Hopefully I can get you in touch with someone who can close to loop. Very nifty app nonetheless.

http://breadpig.com/2011/01/18/hack-club-1-total-success/

Thanks! It'd be great to get LEGO to implement it.

All you would need to do is create a ldd file that people can then import into LEGO digital designer. Then they just click 'buy'.

This has some info on the process http://www.ldraw.org/Category9-All.html

Alternatively figure out how the competition do it... (http://www.brixels.net http://www.mosaicsmaker.com etc)

It looks like LEGO's TOS is pretty restrictive if you come in through official channels. They're going to want to moderate your kit and make sure you're not doing anything commercial:

http://designbyme.lego.com/en-us/Terms/default.aspx?id=13154...

I bet Brickmania would take this on.

http://shop.lego.com/Mosaic/Default.asp?bhcp=1

"You can make a LEGO Mosaic using your own photographs! Use a digital camera or a scanner to make your photograph into a .jpg or a .gif image file on your computer."

"click here to order your unique Mosaic kit with LEGO tiles and instructions customized just for you!"

edit: Looks like you can't buy them anymore, but they used to offer it, with easy image upload -> purchase the mosaic set. I remember seeing it launched a few years back. Probably didn't sell enough to make it worth it.

Other sites that do them to order:

  http://www.brixels.net/index.html
  http://www.mosaicsmaker.com/index.php

If anyone has an feature suggestions or notices any bugs, feel free to submit them to https://github.com/carsonified/brickify/issues. For bonus points, fix the problem up and send us a pull request!

The only thing is when you have black colors, it blends with the background. Take for example mickey: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7f/Mickey_M...

Now brickify: http://brickify.com/#/view/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedi...

Thanks for letting us know - I posted an issue in GitHub (https://github.com/carsonified/brickify/issues/issue/2) and I'll try to take a stab at fixing it sometime in the near future.

I tried to brickify the brickify logo without much success, but I think it's a pretty slick idea none the less.

http://brickify.com/#/view/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrickify.com%2F...

You can edit it, once the algorithm brickifies it :)

Feature Request / Idea: Allow me to swap the color on all on the bricks of one color as well as edit each brick.

Very nice work otherwise!

Thanks for the feature suggestion. I'll post it in GitHub and hopefully we can take a stab at it sometime here in the near future.

Big blocks of colour produce tall stacks of 1x10 bricks, which look like they could fall over.

Shouldn't the algorithm overlap these bricks where possible?

Edit: Presumably the algorithm fills a run of pixels by working from left to right, repeatedly fitting the largest brick it can, then filling in the end with a small brick. Picking different lengths for the bricks within a run will produce the same image but with different overlaps. One technique would be to try every combination of lengths that fit into a run of pixels and maximise the overlaps between these bricks and the rows above and below.

Yeah, in the isometric view it all looks like 1x1 sticks, but the schematic will fill with longer bricks. You can stagger them yourself when you build, but we are working on the algorithm to make it more structurally sound.

Works well on the Y logo:

http://brickify.com/#/view/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fycombinator.com...

Is anyone else getting an application error? -- No such file or directory - ./views/app.haml

I was able to load the Y logo from the comments below and now going back to the main page returns the error in Firefox 3.6

We just rolled out a fix. Sorry about that.

Very cool - I would suggest you offer some examples. I don't really have a pic in mind but I'd like to check it out. Would be cool to see some of the things others have used.

I like this one: http://bit.ly/hV6fY9

That is some excellent marketing. Awesome job, guys and gal.

Seriously I love the mindset of a company that makes a very well-produced video, including score and talking heads, of a side project like this: http://brickify.com/#/about/

SOOOOOO much fun to build this :)

This is by far the kuu-elle-est thing I have seen on the web this year.

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