Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions | Hacker News Reader

Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

brickit.app

659 pointsOrochikaku181 comments

To be honest, what I love about legos is the free play aspect.

When I play with my kids, (now 8 and 10), I find that the key thing is not what pieces we have (admittedly, we have a lot of pieces), or instructions, but developing some theme or challenge.

The theme could be ‘space’ or ‘under water’ or ‘I’m going to build the taller possible leg structure’ or ‘I’m going to build a vehicle that can be blown across the floor with a fan.’ Once they have a theme, they will do amazing stuff.

Also, I believe it’s important to have a big slush pile of pieces. It’s amazing how much builds change when your are scrounging for piece X, and you see piece Y and think, actually…

I see that this app is technologically interesting for the developer, but it doesn’t address my core problem: inspiring kids to get started on free creativity. For that, I’d more like a Lego theme of the day app, maybe slightly inspired or guided by the kids ages or genders. If I did that, I’d have the kids submit pictures of their results, and use those over time to assess and improve the quality of my suggested themes at different ages and Lego piles sizes (there is your AI, if you must).

The pitch would be ‘inspire your kids to new creativity.”

agree on everything you said. Father of 2 (2 and 4 y/o) here, trying to introduce them to lego. I find the app fantastic for learning and inspiration, because I suck at lego and building with blocks myself.

It can be turned into a super supa parenting tool, for lame parents like myself.

I think that the best way to learn is to combine free play with trying out other designs. That's the best way to learn how to achieve the designs you want to make.

When I was younger I would build a set, play with it for a while while modifying it. And after that it would be never built again, because it would disintegrate into the giant collection of bricks I had, used to build custom cities. Perhaps with the exception of trains, which I used to rebuilt close to the blueprints.

Now that I'm old, I'm not in the mood to build custom LEGO structures anymore, and I have some builds (e.g. ISS) that are exactly by the manual and just sitting, looking pretty on furniture. I think my younger self would be disgusted. :)

Lego + social media. People now want to build "good" lego. They want to post pictures/clips for likes/views, which for some translates into money. They need stuff that is all the right color. They want it to be in proportion. This tool will allow them to see what is possible so that they can start a complex build knowing they have the bits to finish it. This is modern lego building.

"Lego is like minecraft, but with a hard limits on the number and type of available blocks."

My preference towards free-play, and opinion against guided-play (following manuals) used to be similar to yours. But my sister made me realize how much that my earlier guided-play was essential to develop my fundamental building skills that allowed my later free-play to thrive. My sister inherited my Lego box but with no manuals, so she only ever knew free-play, and she describe her experience with Lego growing up as frustrating and fruitless, of wanting to build things but not knowing how to even start, because she lacked many fundamental skills.

So I realized a basic truth of pretty much all skills and hobbies: guided play or formal training are not enemies of free creative play, quite the opposite, they fosters creativity by opening many new avenues.

Every musical composers or great jazz improvisers started by playing someone else's music.

Well put.

I once tried to join in on some jazz riffing at Christmas. In spite of being a capable player, I really could not successfully contribute. I didn’t have the appropriate practice of improvising to be successful. I really should’ve learned those blues scales my music teacher had given me.

I guess my point here is, you’re right. The fundamentals are important. Both the guided and the free.

When was this? As a kid in the eighties, there were few unique bricks. Squares, rectangles, varying thickness. Maybe two types of wheels and tires (these were prized above all).

I wonder if the specialization of bricks since then has contributed to that "totally lost" feeling. I look at our pile and it's mostly specialized doodads and widgets for who knows what Star Wars thing a few years ago.

As an 80s kid I made a lot of the same spaceship over and over, even with the limited set. I coulda used some more ideas!

The thing with creativity is that it is not just "inventing things out of thin air". It's picking thru the vast archives of things we've seen and did our brain has and applying it in different way.

Guided building is basically filling that archive with ideas that can be used or changed

"Theme of the day" or just "pick a theme for me" might be interesting, but so is just getting some random schematic that might not even fit in what you'd search for in the first place

I can't be the only one but free play/build gives me a TON of anxiety. It's like I become paralyzed and my mind just goes blank. I have a young son with a couple tubs full of lego pieces.

OTOH, I love to build Lego kits with directions. I could do it for hours... it becomes meditative.

I just tested it on my kids lego clone bricks; there are like 800 of them but they are almost exclusively basic shapes (1x1, 1x2, 2x2, 2x3, 2x4 and 1x4) in red/black/blue/green/yellow/gray. This is a picture of the box: https://static-v3.e-jumbo.gr/uploads/resources/137879/201611... ; you'll see they are exactly like legos.

The app identified 400 pieces (of the 800) and unfortunately the resulting ideas were not possible to be constructed because it required pieces we don't have. Of the 50 ideas I was only able to construct 1 or 2 that had very few pieces.

I tried it a couple of times with diferent layout in pieces or lights, nothing really changed.

Sorry but it doesn't work, at least with my kind of bricks.

So are they trying to upsell you by showing what could be built if you just bought a couple rare pieces?

No, not really, my understanding is that they are not related with Lego. The problem is that the app mis-identifies a lot of my pieces.

Wild to comment that someone’s app for identifying legos doesn’t identify not legos.

These bricks are exactly the same as normal legos and of course they are compatible. I can't differentiate from real legos unless I check if they have the lego logo on them. So I'm not sure this is a problem with these bricks...

Why don’t you try the app on real legos first?

Yes I'll do that also tomorrow, I've got this Lego classic box https://b.scdn.gr/images/sku_main_images/005974/5974558/2021...

It just happened that my kids were playing with the lego clone and I definitely don't want to have both boxes on the floor at the same time :|

They are not the same. They are made of cheaper plastic with looser tolerances, leading to builds that bend or fall apart. And they don't have the tiny LEGO imprint they advertises the quality of the mold and tolerance.

None of that should affect the performance of the app, though.

These is the kind Lego your grandma would buy you for Christmas and you'd have to smile and say thanks while knowing they're not compatible and then vigilantly ensuring they don't contaminate the master Lego set

> None of that should affect the performance of the app, though.

So in every measure relevant to this context, they are exactly the same. Of course they're distinct.

I've been using this app off and on for the past year with my seven year old. He likes it and is able to use it himself with our iPad Pro. It identifies the bricks pretty well but it's not perfect. We've been able to make a number of things but it does give you builds that you cannot make.

Ok, I tried today with my Lego Creative Box that contains ~ 500 original lego bricks (https://b.scdn.gr/images/sku_main_images/005974/5974521/2020...)... Well the results are more or less the same as with my lego clone box. Although it offered me more ideas (~100) I could only do a bunch of them and these with random colors (not the colors it proposed).

I think that the image detection algorith is not working that good; however there is a very simple solution to that: Allow me to enter the IDs of the sets I own (for example the one I mention is the 10696: https://www.lego.com/en-gr/themes/classic/building-instructi...). Get the bricks my sets have contains , for example, for my set https://brickset.com/inventories/10696-1.

Then it should be easy... No computer vision needed :)

Very cool.

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of rocks and tell me how to put them together to build a wall with minimal space between them.

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/stone-wall-texture-pict...

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

There's lots of papers about that algorithm used on warehouse box stocking.

More generalised, the act of putting them together is a subset of bin packing, which is certainly one of the more studied problems of computer science, though NP-hard, and having a pile of rocks of different size complicates things substantially. Getting a decent approximation once you know the dimensions of the rocks is probably doable, but minimising the labour necessary to get the scans you need of each rock is also a huge challenge.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of socks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect match.

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/socks-pile-texture-pict...

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

Sock matching is not really difficult is it? The act of putting them together is the cumbersome part!

Depends on the person. Some are naturally good at playing Candy Crush and might even enjoy it. I'm terrible at it and for me it's borderline torture.

Same with sorting socks.

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

This works remarkably well in that you might think you'd end up throwing away a lot of good socks, but in my experience socks are surprisingly prone to either design flaws that sees many socks from the same batches wear out in the same way around the same time and/or similar wear from your footwear etc., so when they start going odds are you'll see a series of rapid failures, and you're not losing much by replacing them all when you're left with few enough.

Not so fast. Sock magic: I've only bought black socks over the last 5 year, and still I can't seem to find ones anymore that exactly match in both fitting and color (they all seem to have degraded in different color tones)

Maybe your left foot produces slightly more agressive sweat than the right one.

This only really tracks if they intentionally wear socks on specific feet. While some socks have L/R indicators, most don't.

Ah, the trick here is to buy all your socks at the same time, and open all the packs at once. Don't just open a pack every now and then, or they'll age differently and you get the variation in wear and tear. Then once you're down to a few days' worth of raggedy socks, throw them all out at once and open the next batch.

(Source: Am a fellow black-sock-only person who made the above mistake last time around.)

My trick is to have only white socks and to not actually care if they're matching levels of tired.

This requires sock drawer/shelf management. Socks will form a FOFI stack where clean pairs will be taken from the top, worn, washed and returned to the top of the stack while other clean pairs sit beneath without being touched. Those at the top of the stack will wear out faster.

Mitigation might include not washing any socks until all clean pairs are exhausted, but this may result in a smelly linen bin. Alternatives might be keeping clean socks in a pair of tights with the toes cut out - most recently cleaned in the top pushing down, fresh pairs taken from the open toe; hang this up for a better UX.

For my drawers I stack horizontal, old on the left and new fresh washed come in on the right. So you can see what you’ve been wearing and what you haven’t worn for a while and choose accordingly. Works for shirts, socks, underwear, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, the point of a sock monoculture is never to think about matching: as soon as a sock requires any special attention, I simply throw it out.

I only have black ones and a couple of white ones for sports. The white ones are fine, but the black socks get significantly brighter over time. Now sorting almost matching socks is much harder than when I had a hodgepodge. Admittedly I mostly ignore the differences in shade but it doesn't sit well with me.

A sock sorter would be perfect.

Im in a military. I get issued 15 pairs of socks each year in three different styles. But from one year to the next, pairs are never constructed exactly the same. Then the wear/washing history of each pair divides them even within a given year's issue. I have 43 pairs of socks now in my "work socks" drawer (just counted) but no two are interchangeable. When they come out of the drier i still have to individually match them. Interchangable parts tech has yet to crack this field.

Ha I have the same problem. Even the exact same sock won’t match dye colors. Sometimes it’s brighter or darker colors.

Turns out you already have a pair of any combination of socks.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of stocks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect portfolio.

https://www.tradingview.com/heatmap/stock/

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often: Now what I want is something that will scan dating sites for my perfect mate.

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do her.

If your robot is doing her robot, you can let the algorithms do the perfect mate matching, and then just grab a relaxed coffee with her, no sexual pressure anymore. What Žižek would call a great date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xYO-VMZUGo

What meme is this from?

Very cool idea, but what I'd need more often is something that will take a pile of memes and put them together into a perfect post.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan my life and tell me how to put it back together properly.

Or better yet, provide a robot to do it for me.

Maybe take a normal rock wall and break it into tiny pieces, then reassemble.

This could actually be stronger than a wall built from rectangular pieces.

I've been curious to see what a stable diffusion type thing trained on blueprints and schematics could produce.

The magnum opus of such a project would be something that could produce the circuit from the text "a guitar pedal that makes a guitar sound like wet blankets and dry pickles in the washing machine."

The extension of your idea would be a piece of software that could generate the BoM and gcode to assemble the circuit, or in your instance the bricks.

The meta of that would be the circuit that could build circuits that build circuits.

That is a problem in three dimensions, a Photo wont tell you the 3d shape of each rock.

Of course. But I didn't say a photo. (it could be video, it could be lidar, etc) And yeah maybe you need the robot to pick up each rock and look at it from different angles.

My source is that I once leafed through a Japanese in a book store book for rural diy homesteader types that had detailed instructions on how to make a retaining wall for terraced rice fields not dissimilar to the one you pictured, and my impression is that there is a lot of engineering behind the surface, and also the arrangement of the sizes of the stones to make it stable and movement resistant (like to settle back into place after a quake), that make this more than just fitting the shapes together like a jigsaw.. I wish i had actually bought that book now.

Yes it is a challenging problem to do it well. But cool to think about!

A peasant will do that wall better, and (more importantly) for cheaper. I know because I'm a peasant.

Dry-stone walling is a skill!

There's one for bananas on bread.

https://www.ethanrosenthal.com/2020/08/25/optimal-peanut-but...

Build bridges, not walls

Good fences make good neighbors.

I’ll just put this here…

Brrrap! A tree shredder!

Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw -- the source of the noise. Indistinct in the swirling haze, Robert could see two white-suited figures, their jackets labeled "Huertas Data Rescue". The two wore filter masks and head protectors. They might have been construction workers. In fact, this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: first one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder". The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel". Robert flinched from the sight -- and Epiphany [smartglasses] randomly rewarded his gesture with imagery from within the monster: The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data.

- Rainbows End, V. Vinge, 2006

this is similar to how dna used to be sequenced :)

I have this giant pile of old recycled bricks in my back yard and I was thinking "wow, this is oddly specific and useful to me..."

Oh it's _Lego_ bricks (:

Would be awesome if this app contained all Lego sets ever (including the Rebrickable ones) so you know which sets you can build when you just bought bulk Lego at a flee market. But it seems it only contains their own designs and some user submitted content. Yes, it also finds pieces in a stack, but I'd rather do that part myself. Sorting Lego manually is fun!

I subscribed to the free trial for the Play store app, tried it a bit, and now I'd like to cancel my subscription.

I found a "Manage subscriptions" link in the app, and it points to the Play Store app. I can't find an "unsubscribe" button there. If I try o uninstall the app I'm explicitly told "Your active subscriptions will not be canceled". I spent ten minutes looking for this, and I'm a web developer. How on earth will regular Joe be able to unsubscribe this?

Also, can anyone point me in the right direction?

Did you try the Google Wallet and Google Pay apps? Could be in either of those.

Edit: for me it's Play Store, round profile button/account switcher in top right, Payments and Subscriptions.

Click on your image in the corner, there is a payments and subscriptions button. Click unsubscribe.

Found it, Thanks!

That’s one thing that Apple got right, you can cancel any subscription from settings so you don’t have to deal with that crap.

Apple and Google both have all subscriptions in a single place that are easy to manage, this user just doesn't know how to access them.

This is normal. My parents do not understand the iOS settings app at all, and it confuses them that they have to leave their app to manage their apps in a different app. I don't think Apple (or Google) got this right, there is definitely room for improvement for average user UX

Definitely correct: I didn't remember how to access them (I actually did it in the past, but forgot exactly how. My point still stands, I believe: it's too hard, not prominent enough. In particular I was disappointed by the "Manage subscriptions" link that brought me to a screen where I could not do that.

Apple asks you if you want to keep or cancel your subscription when you uninstall an app that has an active sub. There’s also several entry points to the UI, including from the App Store and Settings. Ideally there’d be a deep link option for other apps to link into it, but I’d say Apple clearly has a better experience and makes it easier to cancel these subscriptions.

https://ibb.co/JBz5Rgh

Based on the support that I provide to my iOS parents and grandparents, I think the Apple UX is unacceptably bad.

Fwiw, google has every feature you listed, so that's not "clearly better". Weird to call something "clearly better" when you don't even do a comparison, you just list features.

I mean, it is “clearly better” in that it provides all that Google has, plus a prompt to cancel the subscription, something grandparent comment specifically complained about Google not having. That alone is a “clearly better” experience. It’s also a comment; what do you expect, an ASCII table giving you a play by play of every feature?

You are free to have your own anecdotal experiences but that doesn’t change that objectively, Apple has a slight leg up.

Realistically you shouldn’t be allowed to unsub without first posting your impressions on HN

I loved the AI driven piece recognition. It worked great! But all the things around it are not that good for the price I'd be paying. In particular, I'd like to be able to use the recognition to build a small db of all the pieces I have in each box, so that when I can't find a piece I can use the db to help locate it. I believe it would have worked better, instead of building an app and targeting end user, to build an API service and target developers. This way many different products could be made with this feature.

I've been wishing there was an app where you could point your phone at a pile of scrap lumber and it would tell you things you could make with them. This is a step in that direction even if it's just for lego bricks right now.

In the spirit of the Yo app, does anyone want to invest in bonfire.app?

cutting boards...

I have a literal pile of bricks in my backyard. I thought this was going to be an app that I could scan them with and tell me how to build a pizza oven.

It would be helpful in Argentina... sorry.. couldn't help it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794597

Same! There isn't one standard "red brick" size (like I thought lol), but there are a lot of different sizes. I'd pay for an app like that.

Use the bricks for your base

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

Scan the inside of your fridge — list all the dishes you could make.

Can be done by breaking into two easier problems. First is identifying the ingredient, and second is taking a list of ingredients and amounts and matching with recipe sites that never have their data in a normalized format.

Not quite there with the scanning part, but https://supercook.com comes close.

Jokes on the app - we store leftover spaghetti in reused yogurt containers.

Taxi drivers enlarge their hippocampus by navigating around and learning routes. I definitely feel like Google Maps has affected my ability in certain somehow tangentially related areas to my detriment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm

This kind of thing is cool, but seems like it robs us of an opportunity to practice something important.

Maybe we will replace it with some other skill?

I would be very curious to know how many AI/ML researchers played with Legos and whether this free play was vital in their development. I would assume it is.

I have already accepted the notion that we as a workforce and creativity input will become irrelevant for corporate overlords in the next decade.

I have already moved to the mountains, stopped practicing UX/UI design, stopped digital drawing and painting, minimized smartphone usage and use internet only for work and casual browsing.

Already archived a lot of media, movies, books and OSS software, just in case.

Moved all the work focus towards frontend implementation with clear understanding that the window of opportunity will close in the next 5 years.

Suddenly I understand, completely, the Amish position towards technology.

Yes, what's the point of learning to play the piano when someone has autotune?

The context is in the part "corporate overlords". The popular music uses autotune ad nauseam.

How did you get to this conclusion from an app that helps you figure out what you can build with your Lego bricks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

This app counts your bricks and then matches that count with user submitted builds you have the correct bricks to build. It has no magic AI creativity.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime!

This is one of the most ingenious use of modren technology.

This is how technology should be helping us.

Goodluck.

What's next? Finding a needle in a haystack?

This is pretty neat and I would definitely play with it, but I'm not willing to front that kind of cash on something that might be terrible.

It seems like the ideas are all user submitted -- I was expecting something ML here, like imaginary builds of cars. Cool nonetheless but there's a lot of untapped opportunity.

My first thought was that this would be very useful for part co-mingling or something not-Lego related.

> What's next? Finding a needle in a haystack?

I’m working on a jigsaw puzzle and hit a bit of a dry spell and was hoping there might be an app that could help find the pieces in a pile and where they go. Nothing exists yet that I could see. I imagine with a completed picture and a view of a piece it would be possible to show where in the picture the piece goes to reduce the burden. Extra pints if you can give it a view of the current progress and it could show you where the pieces should go.

I’ve had the same thought. I think the tough bit is getting a clean image of all the pieces. Without controlling the background and lighting it would be quite tough

Kind of similar, a guy making a robot to solve jigsaw puzzles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu_1S77XkiM

Combined downloads for my Scrabble game solver (take a picture of the scrabble board, take a picture of your rack of tiles, play the optimal word) and my jigsaw puzzle solver (finding a needle in a haystack) totalled up to less than the fingers on the hands of a bad Youtube woodworker practicing every unsafe operation with a table saw whilst being inanttentive. After two years, back in 2013-ish, I removed the apps from the app store.

Maybe time to dust that off and try again I'll bet more recent phones make those apps shine

Sorry those didn’t pan out! I’m not sure I would actually pay for such an app since I only do jigsaw puzzles every few years. But it is fun to know it has been done and could be done again.

> I'm not willing to front that kind of cash on something that might be terrible.

I think there's a trial period, but yeah the pricing is steep ($45/yr). Probably worth it for enthusiasts, but much less appropriate for kids.

The pricing is high, but I'd pay nearly that much just for that counts my bricks, even better if he points them out in the picture

> but I'd pay nearly that much just for that counts my bricks

https://countingthings.com/

I had a similar idea, but swapped the Legos for the ikea replacement parts catalog. What’s the cheapest standing desk you can build with these cheap and easily available parts?

They have a replacement parts catalogue?

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/spare-parts/

> Missing a leg for your sofa? Need an extra hinge? Spare parts big or small, we’ve got you covered. Repairing rather than replacing your furniture is great for the environment and great for your wallet!

> You can order smaller spare parts such as screws, knobs or hinges at no cost using our self-service tool. Small spare parts will be delivered directly to your address in approximately 7 to 10 business days.

> To purchase spare parts for your appliance, contact the authorized service center as listed in the user manual provided with the product.

Is there any free functionality aside from the time-based trial? It looks like this is $45/year (or $84/year if paid monthly!), which seems pretty steep.

I mean, I'm not into Lego, but considering what this app does this seems like a pretty fair price. It's doubtless fairly involved to create something like this. It even gives you stylized step by step instruction on how to build then thing it invents for you!

According to others, it does not invent the items — these are submitted by users.

Seems like they could run a CourseHero-style business model, where you get access for X months in return for uploading Y creations. Some people would submit junk, but you would get enough good stuff that it would be worth it. Also, you could make the default value for submissions low, but give big bonuses for submissions that reach a certain level of popularity.

It’s a drop in the bucket for LEGO enthusiasts who spend hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a year on legos.

Undoubtedly true! It would be great if there were feature gating so that kids could use this app even if their willingness/ability to pay is much lower.

They can have different plans, a cheap kids plans which shows simple models which can be built and a pro plan which shows simple and complex models which can be built.

I dunno my time is worth more than that per hour. And sorting all those pieces will take more than an hour. So.. it's cheap.

I assumed many of the users are kids, whose time per hour is worth hardly anything. If they didn't have this app, they'd instead just play with the Legos the old-fashioned way, which accomplishes roughly the same goals.

This seems neat, and if there were some basic functionality (only smaller projects, or a limited number of complex projects per month), I would give it a try with my kid. But there is zero chance I'm going to introduce a subscription that costs $7/mo that would likely be used a handful of times each month.

I don’t think you’re the target market.

Clearly not! But I could be, with a little feature gating.

Finding all the pieces for a build is easy. What's practically impossible is finding a kit that works with your pieces (unless you manually inventory them).

Half the value of LEGO kits is the guaranteed build of the project on the box. This app is a recycling tool for creating kits from "scrap" LEGO.

You are paying the all to avoid buying the new kit.

> zero chance I'm going to introduce a subscription that costs $7/mo

If you buy $50-$200 LEGO kits, you'd buy $84/yr tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693560

Barely a year ago. I thought it was maybe 5 years ago. Time itself must be accelerating.

I need an app that can scan my hard drives, connectome and biochemistry > bleep bloop > tell me what I can still do with my life.

Scan hydrogen atoms and tell me how to built a type III civilization.

Scan quantum resonances and tell me how to bring back my cat.

That’s not hard. Metabolize sugars until cellular and genetic damage is so severe you stop metabolizing sugars and decompose.

Did I need an app for that?

What I remember from childhood was that you were often looking for a particular piece you knew you had, but could not find it. This app could be useful for that.

It's gotten worse, too. There used to be a limited amount of colors. My daughter now has a lot of of the Lego Friends series. It's very difficult, because there's pink, light pink, purple, light purple, and some sort of lilac. So if you want to perfectly build a piece, it takes a whole lot of searching. But then again, it's kinda fun too because you're forced to substitute.

If you keep your LEGO sorted then many builders suggest sorting by part rather than by colour - its a lot easier to identify a pink vs. hot pink 1x4 brick, rather than to find the 1x4 brick in your hot pink box.

However, sorting by part can be frustrating. Imagine only 1x1 tiles/plates (i.e. the pieces which are 1/3 the height of a regular brick), to my knowledge there are:

* 1x1 square plates (i.e. with a stud on top), * 1x1 circular plates, * 1x1 circular plates, with a hole running through, * 1x1 square tiles (i.e. with a flat top), * 1x1 circular tiles, * 1x1 arch-shaped tiles, * 1x1 quarter-circle tiles, * 1x1 circular tiles with a nubbin on top

Yeah, sorting by color is a lot quicker than by part, though once you have things sorted by part (even roughly) it's easier to find placeholders that might not be the perfect color but still perform the same function.

All those 1x1s could go in the same place and it would still help a lot with locating them, just knowing there's a place that only has 1x1s.

If you're sorting to make it easier to build from instructions, sort by color. Otherwise sort by shape/size.

Having recently done some moderately frustrating builds for the first time since my age was in single digits, I discovered that a small amount of pre-sorting radically improved this situation. And it doesn't seem to matter what parameter you index on: colour, size, type - anything to reduce the search space seems to work. Nor does the sort need to be complete. Just reducing the size of the unsorted pile also helps.

Oh man, nowadays, presorting is one of my main ways of Lego play. I never knew I had such ocd tendencies. But if I can change maximal entropy into neat stacks of color and shape, I feel like god.

When my son was still interested and I was building with him, I did not have the patience to pre-sort, but I used to casually sort while searching for a piece, and so the search time for subsequent pieces would gradually drop.

Then kids play once and wreck your presort.

Teach them how!

I waited way too long for that animation to show me some results and then it looped.

Same but click see how it works for the whole video

But by then you've already wasted a minute, and to know you have to watch it yet again to see what the average person expected on the homepage. Slightly irritating, definitely enough for some to not bother clicking

I’d like to see some quantitative review of how well the scan works. Their demo almost looks too good to be true - it seems they even have overlapping pieces, etc. A quick search showed a YouTube review where they said there were quite a few false positives.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693560

For kids I guess it kills creativity, but using the same idea for (house?) decoration would be very neat. Scan your messy things and suggest how you can rearrange them to make it beautiful.

Good, looks like outsourcing the core creativity and imagination. Next make a robot, which pointless builds those objects. Your child now can go consume corporate video streaming content.

Lol. No, they buy new builds with microtransactions and then watch it build them.

You forgot: They pay to have pics of what the app built for them stored on the magic blockchain…

This takes the same position as the building instructions you get with a Lego set.

To me the interesting part is you can buy brick buckets and still allow unexperienced kids to build something cool following instructions.

They’ll still do modifications and evolutions from there, the important part being that they know how it was built and can break it and rebuild again.

When you were a kid wasn't the funniest part modifying the design or building your own? Isn't that kind of the point of Lego? It's in small blocks so you can create something with your imagination?

I have a 5 yo that is very enthusiastic about Legos. It turns out that both directed and free play are good.

He gets new kits and starts by following the instructions. He learns techniques along the way. How to interlock to make things that are strong and won’t fall apart. Patterns for building subassemblies like body panels or spoilers.

As soon as he’s done following the instructions he takes the whole thing apart, and starts building his own creation with the pieces, applying the concepts he learned.

It’s kind of like music. You don’t learn to play piano by composing songs, you start by playing other people’s music to learn the fundamentals. Then you can start riffing on it.

When I was a kid imagination filled in all the missing details of my lego build and it look awesome and amazing. Now that I am older I just look at them as a low resolution approximation of the real world and not as exciting it was before.

A lot of kids fall into that bucket yes.

There’s also kids who need a bit of push at the start, and/or will go through a full build following the directives to see what they want to change, or how they’d build it better.

TBH I fall in the latter category, and take that approach for a lot of things. I.e. I’ll follow a coffee brewing recipe to the letter to see what it gives, and infinitely iterate from there, including taking completely different approaches to compare.

...can't you still do that, even with this app, if you want?

I want that for my tools and parts

Snap picks of every shelf and drawer then just allow me to ask where is it and get a pic with circled in tool.

I have an app that scans my paper and tells me what to draw. It's pretty great.

Perhaps the app should have a paperclip that pops up...

Pretty amazing what AI can do already. It's one of those ideas that sound logical when you explain it, and hard when you think about how to build it.

Thereby defeating the fundamental benefit of playing with Legos. So much software tries so hard to replace what never needed replacing.

For the folks asking about non-LEGO

https://www.countthings.com/

This seems like a fun way I can share my big tubs of lego with my kiddo. He stills thrives on instructions. Thanks for sharing.

The fact that it talks about "itunes" in the google play store app description is just...

Won't the amount of variations possible in the bricks be very limited? A full size brick, a half brick, a 3/4 brick and sizes in between. Isn't the app then going to give the same set of recommendations for almost every brick pile? In that case is it even a brick scanning app anymore?

Post read edit: Facepalm. This is about Lego bricks!

A prime example of how comments made without reading the article look like.

I need something like this for a section of puzzles rhat I got (all one color...).

Next: scan a pile of cash and propose what to do with the calculated amount...?

At first I thought we were building things with "bricked" iphones.

Wow really surprising how many folks here don't understand that lego typically comes in kits with instructions. By building a lot of sets using instructions, you can learn patterns that help you be more creative in free play. This app is not creativity inhibiting any more than coloring books or sketching instructionals inhibit kids from drawing their own things. It's just a different and also valuable activity.

LEGO bricks, not the building materials.

i saw the title and was thinking of pizza ovens ive seen made with loose bricks and started wondering what else could be made.

It must be intentional that the word Lego appears nowhere on this site, surely?

Or worried about Lego suing them?

Lego are very protective of their brand as they have every right to be.

There's a store near me that sells Lego-like sets of their own distinctive building and the box states "Quality Blocks - Compatible with other brands"

Other trading websites for Lego sets and parts use the words "bricks" or "blocks" in their names instead.

>as they have every right to be.

I don't care if they technically have a right to do so, but they try and remove the usage of LEGO even when its usage falls under fair use.

Using LEGO in the examples you gave would fall under fair use.

Rats, I have a large pile of 10 to 60lb stones in my yard and was slightly excited by the headline.

This is neat, but I feel it really detracts from the creativity you are supposed to be exercising by using Legos in the first place.

I'd hope no one lets their kids use this, or they'll just get good at assembling IKEA furniture instead of designing the furniture.

You can use this without exclusively using this

I agree, my 5 year old loves coming with random "inventions". He's proud of his random designs loves showing them off. He owns the whole of process coming up with idea to building it. It builds his confidence. I would not use this app.

Just yesterday my 9 year-old proudly revealed his latest flying creation, created - as almost all our children's Lego builds are - entirely out of his own imagination and from the multiple tubs of bricks that sit next to his bed.

Each new Lego boxed set gets built from the instructions exactly once. Admired for a while (days to months), then duly ripped to bits and the pieces are used to build much better things that then can - and do - change on an hourly basis.

I'm not about to interrupt my kids' creativity by even telling them about this app. They need less screen time, not more.

Totally agree. All though in modern times they’ll just watch ten YouTube / Netflix / paramount+ videos where some dude builds Lego shit. Look at all the Minecraft videos out there.

I kinda wonder if it’s us who needs to catch up. I mean I watch city skylines videos, FPV videos, and gun videos. All those are inspiration for my hobbies. What’s the difference between that and a Lego or “LOL surprise” video my kid watches?

Dunno dude. Kinda think we are the old geezers in this one.

the externalisation of human abilities into machines is going to be a major theme in your offsprings life and encountering this app could inspire interest in how automation is achieved.

Why not just... play with the LEGO?

Because more tech is always the correct solution, right?

The world will be a better place once we outsource everything to our machine overlords, can't you see?

Why waste precious time thinking when you can get your answers right now? Thinking don't lead you nowhere, the machines will do it better than you anyway.

Tech is a way of controlling things without ever leaving the comforts of the inside of your own head. For every circumstance, a map. For every need, a button.

Touching actual reality with your own meaty paws and wet eyeballs is just upsetting.

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