Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers | Hacker News Reader

Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers

kottke.org

265 pointsdev_tty0140 comments

For anyone looking for more of this, there are several channels that are all pushing LEGO Technic to its limits, not just Brick Technology (https://www.youtube.com/@BrickTechnology).

Some of my other favorites in this niche include:

Brick Experiment Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BrickExperimentChannel

Dr. Engine: https://www.youtube.com/@DrEngine

Brick Machines: https://www.youtube.com/@BrickMachinesChannel

Jamie's Brick Jams: https://www.youtube.com/@JamiesBrickJams

Build it with Bricks: https://www.youtube.com/@BuilditwithBricks

GazR's Extreme Brick Machines!: https://www.youtube.com/@GazRsExtremeBrickMachines

Great list, thanks!

For original models, often with advanced and beautiful moving parts, JK Brickworks [1] is great, too.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@JKBrickworks

Thanks for this. I was looking through my subscriptions, and this one slipped past me.

Akiyuki makes infrequent videos, but beautiful LEGO machines.

https://youtube.com/@akiyuky

Akiyuki is well known in the GBC part of Lego.

The Great Ball Contraption is in part a standard that defines how different GBC modules connect, and by following that standard you can have a large number of them, built by different people in isolation, be linked together.

https://www.greatballcontraption.com/wiki/standard

https://youtu.be/RRiAI5xrFEM (you will Akiyuki in there a few times)

Yoshihito Isogawa makes wonderful little contraptions https://youtube.com/@ISOGAWAYoshihito (collected in several lovely books)

Blog spam for https://youtu.be/HY6q9hwYcoc?si=VCBF2FlHADUZyH_1

I wouldn’t call Jason Kottke blog spam.

Assuming good faith here, I think there might have been a misunderstanding:

The person you're replying to, didn't call any person "blogspam". That would be rude, and I wouldn't call ipsum2 rude.

They didn't even call any blog, "blogspam". That would also likely be rude, and again, I wouldn't call ipsum2 rude.

They called this particular post, "blogspam", because that is a good definition for a blog entry which reposts someone else's content without adding much beyond the original content, which is an accurate description of this blog entry.

Note that this definition doesn't describe a person, it describes a behavior. Misinterpreting feedback about a behavior, to be feedback about a person, is likely to lead to such misunderstandings. If we can make sure to tell the two apart, we can eliminate some of the strife in the world at no cost :)

If your blog is that good, you're allowed to spam occasionally.

Huge fan of this guy, very talented and creative mechanical lego engineer. You can also tell he spends a lot of time editiing his videos.

This is very impressive and looks quite fun! Do higher end competitions, like FRC, can also support the iterative approach of trial and error to solve a problem ? Not sure if due to lot of small parts and dependencies - particularly with software- its much harder to iterate around it

Check their YouTube channel out for like 10-20 more fun challenges like this. Whoever’s responsible is so creative and clever and also very good at making entertaining videos.

I love how the failed designs in this video will sort of slink away from the tower sheepishly.

With frc it depends a lot more on the specific team and how they work, some teams will very rapidly prototype lots of things to find what works for them, while others will just have an idea they like and start building. It's more of a time management issue than anything.

The FRC team I was on (years ago) would prototype individual components of the robot, but for the whole robot design they would just design the entire thing in CAD before actually starting building. Obviously there would then be some iteration as some parts work or don’t work, but the large majority of the robot would stay the same after the initial model.

Slightly off-topic, but I was recently very disappointed to learn that Lego Mindstorms was discontinued some time ago without replacement. It’s such a shame that hardly modifiable licensed IP shovelware sets are now by far the most profitable product lines for Lego. Supposedly that’s true in Asian markets in particular. The kinds of sets we grew up with that inspire creativity and technical understanding are at best kept as a niche, at worst abandoned.

Yes, i learned this recently as well and was devastated. A very core part of my journey to becoming an engineer.

> recently very disappointed

Here too. Apparently the components are scattered through the education-oriented Spike Prime sets. If you can stomach the kid-oriented colors, that’s the best route to recreating childhood Mindstorms robots.

For what it's worth, it seems like "lego spike prime" is effectively equivalent to mindstorms, in that it includes a programmable brick that can connect to multiple motors, sensors, and can be programmed in a scratch-like environment.

I don't know why there was a branding change, but the capabilities seem pretty similar to the RCX I had as a child. Though programming over bluetooth is likely to be more reliable than the IR adapter.

All the current motors are very controllable (absolute position, speed, etc).

They can be hooked up to:

- A battery box, with simple buttons.

- A hub, controlled via bluetooth (protocol is documented, and there are some libraries).

- A hub that can be programmed (spike).

- A raspberry pi, with an official hat (build hat). This also comes with a python library.

I'm actually pretty happy with these motors. The only downside is that the technic sets are meant to be controlled with an app.

For the climber, I thought the final solution was going to end up being rails that just pushed a weight further out from center mass at the top of the tower. The ball pendulum was cool nonetheless!

The camera angles and editing on this video is so satisfying. Great work.

Really impressive. I wonder how much time each design takes? The video makes it look like it is easy for the author.

About half-way in they encounter problems with the barrel jamming, which reminded me of this interesting challenge wintergaten had with his ball separator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y83I8mLKufo

I'm going to hell, because my first thought was "LEGO airliners".

Excelent for a high school course in physics.

I'm disappointed to see that he didn't try the simplest and most obvious solution: deploy a telescopic boom that pushes the tower against the floor.

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