Life-size Lego car runs on air | Hacker News Reader

Life-size Lego car runs on air

theage.drive.com.au

65 pointsyitchelle20 comments

The car itself is fascinating. The article is very weird. Instead of talking about the obvious challenges of building a full size Lego car, plus a working compressed air engine, it contains discussions of the local car industry closing down?

I hope this particular project shows up somewhere else, and some of the techniques used are explored in depth. When James May built a fall sized Lego house there were many structural problems to solve. These are interesting to just about anyone technically minded.

The Australian press is... funny. They have a tendency to hunt for drama and scandal.

The Australian press? Try all press.

As some have said it is indeed compressed air. I'm fascinated by the engine. You can see the Lego parts whirring away in this video

http://youtu.be/_ObE4_nMCjE

How much do you wish you could hear the sound of it?

Anyone familiar with the orbital engine design they're using? The wikipedia article about it is pretty sparse and I didn't find anything better in a quick web search.

Really unbelievable...! But I can not understand how it gets its power. In a "normal" car there are pistons who makes ignition.Here what?:P ... The only it says about it is "runs on air". Anyway still beautiful...

I believe it means that it "runs on compressed air".

I assume it runs on compressed air, is slow and can't go far. It was funny to me that they article explains that the owner raised money to pay Romanians to build it for him and then later takes a tone of complaining about auto manufacturers closing local operations.

Haha. I'm glad I'm not the only who did a double take when the Melbourne man, who we were led to believe completed the project, simply asked people for money and then hired a teen in Eastern Europe with peanuts to build the thing. All the while talking about the ills of out-sourcing.

Fantastic project, but what a strange, article.

Lego has always had 'pneumatic' pistons and valves. I would assume they have developed a way to use a large array of these to provide the power.

There are actually production compressed air cars built by Tata Motors, MDI, and others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car

Compressed air is a means of storing energy, since you can tap that energy by opening the valve. It's not actually that misleading; gasoline is also a means of storing energy and we say in everyday speech that those cars "run on gasoline".

But it's not an energy breakthrough over an electric cars, you still have to put in energy to compress the air, just as you have to charge the battery of an electric car.

"Like many cars on the mainstream market, the Lego project was built abroad - by the Romanian “teenage tech genius” Raul Oaida, who was 17 years old when the project commenced. The car was then shipped to Australia once completed."

So really, Raul Oaida should be the one with his face in the news.

The site for the project is a bit sparse on details bit can be found here http://www.superawesomemicroproject.com/

Call me extremely underwhelmed.

Regarding the claim that it, "runs on air", details?

Regarding the statements,

> "The project was more to show what’s possible in a connected society."

and

> "The project is considered by Sammartino to be a timely wake-up call for automotive manufacturers, in light of recent announcements from Ford and Holden that they will close down their local operations." I personally believe the Wikispeed SGT01 and OScar are more impressive in these areas.

   - http://wikispeed.org/2013/09/setting-up-your-own-wikispeed-shop-wherever-you-are/  

   - http://www.theoscarproject.org/

The more I see about this the more i'd like them to post pictures of the insides of the engine and the transmission.

Looks nice and all, but I'm gonna call shannanigans on this until I see a gearbox/drivetrain

better article at wired http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/12/air-powered-lego-hot-ro...

This is fascinating, I always been a huge fan of Lego and this project is simply amazing! I wish we could get more details related to the building process.

Now let's see it turn around and go up the hill.

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