This is just wrong

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Mike Walsh

This is just wrong. Saw this at the Wake Forest Wal-Mart yesterday. I suspect the collectible mini-figs would be a huge shop lifting problem. Looks to me like someone helped themselves to a couple mini-figs.

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Judging at the NC State Fair

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Mike Walsh

This morning Joe Meno and I judged the LEGO exhibits at the 2010 North Carolina State Fair.  Overall I think the number of entries is down from last year but the quality of entries has gone up, particularly in the younger age group.  I’ll post some pictures later and I don’t want to give anything away but the Best of Show in the older age group was spectacular.

All of the LEGO entries and a small NCLUG exhibit will be on display in the Hobbies and Handicrafts building from October 14 – 25, 2010.

Posted in NC State Fair, NCLUG | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Getting ready for Fox50 Family Fest

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Mike Walsh

This weekend I will have my amusement park on display at Fox50’s Family Fest. It hasn’t been set up in quite a while so this will be interesting. I know the Ferris Wheel needs some attention, not sure about the other three rides.

I think the last time I had it set up was at 2009 LEGOPalooza but it might have been 2008.  For that event I had the rides running off of the power picked up from the 9v train track.

The Amusement Park is actually designed to run off an RCX (I built it long before the NXT was available).  The RCX program is really quite simple – it starts and stops the rides at random intervals changing direction periodically.  The change of direction helps make sure the LEGO gears don’t bind up from running the same direction for hours on end (which is what happened to my Ferris Wheel).

The code for the amusement park is written in NQC.  I much prefer C-like code to the visual programming environment.  But in order to get the code up and running again, I needed a development area.

I’ve changed computers several times since I last worked on the amusement park and no longer have MindStorms RIS or BricxCC environments loaded.  I do have my old laptop that I’ve loaded Windows 7 on and am using for NXT programming with my daughter.  I tried to install the old MindStorms software and BricxCC on it and the software installed ok but I was unable to get the IR tower to work.  I searched the Internet for a solution and the best I came up with was a recommendation to run it under XP in a virtual environment.

Since I am already running ML-CAD, LPub, and some other L-Draw utilities under a Windows XP virtual machine (btw – I love VMware), adding the RCX development environment to it appeared to be the quickest solution.

After installing the RIS software and BricxCC, I connected the USB tower and it was recognized!  I dug up the amusement park code, found my RCX and some 9v motors and tested it.  Everything is working as expected so now I have (a) a working development environment and (b) a working program.  Tonight I hope to get the Amusement Park out of its box and get it set up.  Assuming all is well, I hope to fix the Ferris Wheel tonight as well.

If you are in the Raleigh-Durham area, NCLUG will have an exhibit at Fox 50’s Family Fest on Saturday October 2, 2010 from 12:00 to 5:00.  My Amusement Park will be part of the exhibit.

Posted in Events, NCLUG, Robotics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Entering the LEGO competition at NC State Fair

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Mike Walsh

As I noted a few days ago, along with Joe Meno (editor of Brick Journal) I am again judging the LEGO competition at the 2010 North Carolina State Fair.  I’ve had a few questions about submitting an entry so I thought I’d note a couple things that have been asked or we’ve seen over the years.

  1. How do I enter? A couple years ago the Fair changed the entry process, it is all computerized now and registration must be submitted 3-4 weeks before the Fair.  This year, the entry deadline for the LEGO category is September 24, 2010.  To enter, you need to fill out the proper entry form for category EE in the Hobbies and Crafts section of the Premium Guide.  All sections of the Premium Guide are posted online including Section EE.
  2. What do you look for? The first thing we look for are standard LEGO (or K’Nex) kits and eliminate them from judging.  All works are to be original.  One of the reasons the Fair has asked Joe and I to come back and judge each year is because we are able to recognize what is a LEGO design and what isn’t.  

    As the rules note in the Premium Guide, all entries are to be original creations.  Placing a LEGO set in a diorama doesn’t make it an original creation.  We also look for original ideas and construction techniques.  We look for age versus complexity.  We recognize that not everyone has an extensive LEGO collection and as such, don’t penalize designs that use a multitude of colors.

  3. What are common mistakes? The most common mistake we’ve seen is not entering in the right category.  Usually this is a North Carolina themed model entered in the General category but a couple times we’ve seen them the other way.  

    A non-NC themed model entered in the NC category is essentially disqualified since it doesn’t meet the guidelines set out in the Premium Guide.  When a NC themed model is entered in the General category, it will be judged accordingly.  A couple years ago a model that likely would have won the NC themed category was entered in General where I think it was awarded a 4th or 5th place.

     I suspect the main reason we see entries in the wrong category is the child didn’t know what he or she was going to build at the time they had to submit their entry.  There tends to be fewer entries in the NC theme category than in the General category although last year the gap had closed quite a bit.

     There are also 2-3 models each year entered into the wrong age group which automatically disqualifies them.  Unfortunately since the Fair has computerized much of their processes, there is no way move entries from one category to another because the entry numbers don’t appear on the judging forms.

Posted in NC State Fair | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Early draft of CTB-6600 instructions

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Mike Walsh

Off an on over the last few days I’ve been working on a new set of instructions.  I’ve long wanted to capture instructions for my 6 Car Airport Shuttle and I finally did so last weekend.  The actual capture work in ML-CAD didn’t take long, a few hours at most.  As I’ve noted before, generating a useful set of instructions is not a trivial task and I’ve been toying with it periodically since Sunday.

Every time I use Kevin Clague’s LPub application I am amazed.  Having done numerous instructions by hand a number of years ago, I have tremendous respect for what his program is capable of.  I had stopped doing instructions because they were tremendously time consuming – LPub makes doing instructions a rather enjoyable process.

At this point I have a decent draft completed.  I say draft because, while complete, there are few things I’m still not happy with and a couple things wrong which I am struggling to fix.  The instructions are 28 pages long and a large download (about 18MB).

The two things I am chasing right now are:

  • There are several places where the step numbers aren’t present and I can’t figure out why.
  • I am also unsure how to deal with the final assembly.  It is long – almost 200 studs but only 4 studs wide and about 5 bricks tall.  I can’t seem to get a final assembly image to scale without affecting all of the other images being scaled as well so for now, I have left it out.
  • The cover is rendered as a separate model and then inserted into the PDF file using Acrobat to replace the empty cover page.

[download#20#image]

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