Rebrickable – Build with Lego | Hacker News Reader

Rebrickable – Build with Lego

rebrickable.com

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I've been using Rebrickable for around 8 years, and I've shared over 70 of my creations there, so I wanted to share some of the things I've appreciated about the site beyond the core features of being able to rebuild LEGO sets into new things, manage LEGO inventory, and share creations.

1. The community. I've shared a fairly large amount of content (some of it of pretty low quality), and I've always received positive feedback or tactfully worded constructive feedback. I've yet to see a negative comment on my work. It's a community of folks hanging out sharing their hobby together.

2. The set inventories. The community works hard to keep these up-to-date. I've found them to be very reliable. These are all freely available for download as well. This is a godsend to folks like me who prefer their LEGO inventory to be in a local database they can query.

3. The business model. Most features are available for free in an ad-supported manner, but users can pay for premium features and the removal of ads.

Every community and site I find that revolves around Lego is nice, sensible, civil and positive.

I cannot name another hobby or interest for which that is true.

Is Lego just so wholesome? Or is there some drama I’m missing?

Fly fishing?

The common thread is probably patience-based and non-competitive.

There are certainly some negative people on the site, but the moderator team do a good job of making sure any criticism is genuine and not a personal attack.

Thanks for your continued support :)

Hey, I built this site and just noticed the traffic. If anyone has questions, ask away :) A better starting url is https://rebrickable.com/

Standard questions: how does the backend look like and what frameworks did you use for frontent and backend?

More specific questions:

Where do you get the sets content from?

Did you ever have copyright issues?

- Django + Postgres + Ubuntu. Runs on Linode with some AWS usage and Digital Ocean for backups (I prefer backups on different platforms).

- Content is community driven, along with a team of volunteer admins to maintain it.

- Copyright problems are constant. People try to submit MOCs designed by other people all the time.

Is this a passion project or a business? How did you get started? And are you very into Lego?

Bonus question, what did you think of the Lego Masters series that started last year?

It started off as a side-project for fun, now has grown so large it's my primary income. Unfortunately it hasn't left me with enough spare time to enjoy LEGO much though.

My kids enjoyed LEGO Masters (Australia), and it certainly seemed to bring some new people to the site.

Did you or anyone you know work on the obvious issue of cataloging the vast piles of legos out kids have using computer vision / AI? Cataloging inventory by hand is so discouraging. Ps. I didn’t check but I assume I can just upload some CSV with what parts I have etc? The issue is that doing it by hand sounds like a nightmare. Any ideas of attempts to auto scan parts on the floor and giving some estimate at least using open CV etc? (I should Google it first before asking probably...)

Edit: are solutions like this practical, or it’s easier to just sort by hand?

https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-lego-image-r...

If your question is about getting the contents of a Lego set, it is easier than it used to be.

First, every building instruction manual these days has the full inventory of pieces on the last pages.

Second, you can download a PDF of the instruction without owning the set. For example on page 43 on this one https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/7519...

Depends what you mean by "practical". Assuming you've done CV/ML stuff before, you could probably get something working pretty well over a weekend, and I think I could solve it completely with a bit more effort via 3D scanning + synthetic dataset generation... but unless you have cubic meters of lego to sort, doing it by hand would be faster, albeit less fun.

There have been several attempts that I know of. But they all tend to have a low number of categories they sort into - tens vs the thousands of actual categories that exist.

I have tried it myself and it simply needs more input data (ie photos). However, that is something I might follow up on later as I can fairly easily get more data just by asking my community :)

One of the best aspects of LEGO is teaching kids creativity. In my childhood, I never had a helicopter set or anything fancy, I only had bricks and LEGO people, but I built whole cities, helicopters, beaches with palm trees, trucks, airplanes. I only needed a picture, but most of the time not even that.

I have been called "very creative person" multiple times over my life, and I'm pretty sure part of the reason is playing hundreds of hours with LEGO this way.

The modern implementation of LEGO is Minecraft, so you should allow your child to play it.

Lego Minecraft is actually quite good: "classic" two-by-four and two-by-two bricks (modern Lego is mostly one stud wide, because you can have more detail without making the models very large), no stickers (everything is pad printed), and sensible colors. And a reasonable amount of not-tiny bricks (in Lego world, in absolute terms it's still an expensive toy).

Many people don't like the Minecraft mini figures, but you can just throw them in some bin and ignore them.

My brother, sister and I inherited a lot of Lego from older cousins. No real sets, just masses of pieces. We built an entire city, rudimentary economy rules, I wrote my first computer program to balance the cheque book stubs that we wrote each other... we must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on that verandah

As a creative playground my oldest has got into Lego Worlds much easier than Minecraft but it's also far more limiting, looking forward to carrying that over and teaching them the possibilities around redstone

The transition of LEGO to more of a model building thing has been interesting, as has the increase in level of obsession places like HN have for LEGO. I feel that this is field ripe for disruption; for someone to build model kits that are as accessible and approachable as LEGO, but drop the pretence of being general bricks.

IKEA for fun? :)

Whats the best age to introduce lego to kids?

We started giving Lego sets for our kids 1st birthdays ;). The eldest - 8yo - is now building anything on any scale in no time. Just made 7 MOCs for colleagues this Christmas with him designing and me clicking in BrickLink studio. So much fun :)

I started with sets when I was 2, over 40 years ago. I think it’s more a question of instilling the motivation to build and be curious.

For me, it was inability to afford any other toys, so LEGO became my dream medium.

For others, that might be an exciting challenge posed. For example, during COVID we have been doing weekly “LEGO Masters” challenges with my niece and nephews over Zoom, where we pick a theme and then present to each other a week later. They are 5, 5, and 8, and then my partner’s brother, cousin, and I routinely join in. It’s not as much a competition as it is a creativity prompt, an encouragement of presentation and sharing (and thinking about your share of the presentation time), and a way to get to know each other better while distant.

Incidentally, I got into Rebrickable a few months ago after starting to (finally) organize my collection during lockdown and these challenges. I spent a couple hours checking off nearly all of the sets that I know that I own, and when I was done, the site told me the value was about $25,000. I’m kind of shocked.

My son is 2 1/2 and loves to do jigsaw puzzles but with lego, he seems not very interested yet. Maybe 3d reasoning develops a bit later.. But for around that age or a bit older like 3-4, what sets work best? Simple block sets? Sets that include small lego people? Thank you. I grew up behind the iron curtain and lego wasn’t available until I was a bit older and we were playing with other things

Maybe sets that relate to real-world interests? I remember fire/police vehicles and race cars being a hit.

The link goes directly to a login page, with no other information. Perhaps you could like to something specific or informative, or alter the title to explain what this is?

Funny, I haven't noticed that (because I'm logged in).

https://rebrickable.com/

I noticed the same thing. Even after poking around in the drop-down menu, there's no obvious page that explains the site, or shows examples.

Hypocritically, I stuck around for a few minutes to try to find out. Perhaps the best example: https://rebrickable.com/search/?q=Cats#mocs

https://rebrickable.com/about/

The link is wrong, as it goes to "/home/", which is, well, your "home" if you are logged in. Would be good to just link to "rebrickable.com".

You can click on "Build!", then select the Lego sets you already have, configure your obsession about slightly different parts (basically "the same, but there is a small variation in the newer part that no normal person would ever notice"), and it spits out all the Lego sets (official and fan-made) that you can build out of the parts you already have (and those that you can't quite build, but not much is missing – with direct link to Bricklink stores).

Slightly of topic. About BrickLink. Just the other day I tried to order pieces for 7 MOCs on BrickLink. This works quite well but ... - Don’t ever leave the store selection screen. You will loose your selection. - When created your carts and then facing store restrictions like minimum avg lot price you might have to go back to square one - After making some orders then and wanting to go to store selection ... you have the challenge to apply orders to wanted lists. You really should not use multiple wanted lists because you cannot easily apply multiple orders to multiple wanted lists - Upgraded to seller to be able to use the API. Why this restriction? - Had to create some scripts to combine orders and wanted lists to be able to create a new wanted list for ordering batch #2

But that’s BrickLink. Cool site BTW combining all those stores.

Amazing. Great site. So many awesome models.

Why are Lego models so compelling? Often times as compelling or more than other scale models. Trains, doll houses, architectural models, recreations, etc.

Much younger me worked for a toy startup, a modular terrain and architecture system for scale model trains. The boss man collected toys, which we'd play test and learn from.

Nothing was as compelling as Legos. Play value wise, Rokenbok was the only competitor, but its construction system sucks. Our own toy system was "neat", like a less cool Christmas train display in the store window.

I was trying to do the software. Think MineCraft meets LegoCAD. I failed, of course. I'm still clueless how MineCraft succeeded where so many others have failed. Just build everything with cubes (voxels). I would have never thought of that. My personal "worse is better" war story.

We also wanted something like rebrickable.com. Allow customers to share designs, play around inside each other's worlds. And then let customers buy those parts as custom sets.

I think the reason Lego is so compelling is that the fact that you can internalize the list of pieces and understand how the system works adds appeal to just looking at a model- a sort of "wow, look how they did that" factor.

Is there any place where you can build LEGO stuff in a 3D viewer, then play with it (physics engine), and perhaps even with VR goggles in augmented reality?

Blockland[0] is basically this, minus VR. I would probably recommend staying away from the community, though..

[0]: http://blockland.us/

This is probably my number one VR application I want. I don't like Lego CAD applications (physical feel of building is important) and don't want to/have the room for "infinite" sets. I've seen some prototypes of VR lego builders. If I had the time I'd absolutely do this as a hobby project, with a focus on VR interaction and feel.

I would spend significant money on a simple device that takes a bucket of arbitrarily mixed legos and sorts them by type, size and maybe colour. The main thing holding me back from reusing all the legos we have is the difficulty of finding the right pieces in the endless mess.

Out of interest - what is a significant amount of money to you?

Over the years we've accumulated what I'd estimate to be more than a thousand dollars worth of lego bricks (based on the prices of the various sets). I'd readily pay the equivalent of two or three decent sets (or a typical game console) to unlock this latent replay value for myself and the kids.

Considering that a 1000 brick set costs about 100 dollars, you have roughly 10.000 bricks. It's not too much, with some patience and with the aid of two kids you can sort them all in a rainy afternoon. The ideal is to sort them into a lot of small buckets, like the ones you would use to sort screws and stuff.

We've tried this several times - the napkin math seems sound at first but unfortunately the amount of patience and discipline required vastly exceeds what we could achieve in one afternoon. After multiple lego sorting sessions I realised we had turned what is supposed to be a creative and fun toy into a laborious chore, to the point that the kids dreaded the thought of spending another hour mindlessly sorting bricks into bags.

The sorting can be quite relaxing for some people (ie me). Kind of like a background task you can perform while watching a movie and calm your mind of things.

Yes! If the OP poured me a glass of scotch I'd very happily sort his 10.000 brick collection between sips.

For a much larger collection (as the guy who got a bag of his own weight), some sort of automatic sorting would start to be envisageable.

A couple years ago I came into possession of roughly my body weight's worth of bulk unsorted lego. The sort job took about 300 hours. I have never in my life put so much (unpaid) effort into something so mundane.

Some people don’t exaggerate. They just remember things bigger

A couple years ago I came into possession of roughly my body weight's worth of bulk unsorted lego. The sort job took about 200 hours. I have never in my life put so much (unpaid) effort into something so mundane.

@jacquesm's efforts in this direction may interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889

Just sorting them by size groups can be super helpful. For example, sort 1x1 items, technic pieces, and large items (more than 8 studs in length).

I'm sure I've seen a Lego Mindstorms Lego sorter somewhere.

Try this Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=Lego+Mindstorms+Lego+sorter

For those looking for simple gifts to give. The "Creator 3-in-1" sets always have tons of alternative builds and many sets are under $15 USD. A random one I found is the "Futuristic Flyer" [0] that comes with three builds and rebrickable has 32 alternative builds for it.

[0] https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/?q=31086

Funny seeing this now, since I've recently (within the past month or so) gotten into LEGO as a hobby again. Seems like a lot of people have as well this year?

I've found it to be a wonderful combination of nostalgia and relaxation. And what a perfect time to get back into the hobby; it looks like there is an exploding section of "adult" LEGO sets these days. The Saturn V rocket is amazing, second only to the NES build. The NES set is just crazy; the TV you build is a kinetic sculpture with a scrolling Mario level.

I ended up using Rebrickable recently for data munging because I wanted to build two MOCs. The Chris MvVeigh designed LEGO Apple 2 and LEGO IBM PC. He used to sell them as sets, but got hired by LEGO and so discontinued them :( But you can still find the instructions on his site. A bit of data entry and munging, thanks in part to Rebrickable, I was able to get everything imported and buy the parts myself from LEGO and bricklink. It's really wild to get a package of LEGO pieces shipped all the way from the Netherlands and Finland.

I just wish my wallet didn't regret getting into this hobby...

Yes, forced lockdowns means more people inside playing with their toys :) The site stats definitely show that. I did a post back in May showing the initial impacts: https://rebrickable.com/blog/257/coronavirus-impacts-on-afol...

Hey I saw you were part of a hardware startup. I am trying to do the same and I'm wondering if you have a few minutes to talk? my email is stephenmattison@gmail.com

New lego is expensive. Used lego is ridiculous. I work in the military and thought a lego model of a specific airplane might be a good group christmass present for the boss (inside joke/story). 100ish parts = 2000$ for only 85% of needed parts! I realize some of the parts are rare, but perhaps more biulding guides would be sold if they used parts that were reasonably availible in the market.

Compared with inflation, new lego sets are less expensive than they were in the past.

Used lego, I agree it's going to be hard to find all the individual pieces for a specific set. However, if all you're looking for is a bunch of bricks, you can buy them by the pound/count/whatever in various places (including amazon/ebay) and get them for a great price.

JFTR, In a year since BrickLink acquired by LEGO® Group still there is no explanation provided to LDraw.org Team.[0]

[0] https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23768.html

Explanation for what?

Explanation for what is actual state of BrickLink resources. Until BrickLink was acquired, LDraw used many resources from BrickLink website & BrickLink used resources from LDraw website.

Why would the acquisition change anything about that?

Due to licensing on content provided by LDraw & earlier provided by BrickLink.

I’m not sure i follow. How does the acquisition change this?

> How does the acquisition change this?

We don't know, as there no explanation provided to LDraw.org Team yet.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159556#25178143

My point is why explanation is required in the first place. I assume I might be missing an impression part here that wasn’t communicated.

Very cool :) Unfortunately it seems the sets are not complete so I can only add 2/3's of my kids' collection.

Legos were one of my favorite childhood toys. Nothing was better than completing a design then smashing to start over again.

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