MOD: Car key improvement

My car key had been an sad sight for a long time. The rubber had deteriorated and I had not been able to keep the key on a ring for months. I got tired of quick fixes with super glue and decided to build something out of Lego.

The first step was easy, get rid of that rotten rubber.

I was now left with the bare key and the little computer chip that talks to the car, making sure it's the right thing that turns the ignition. After this I tried a few solutions but nothing really worked. I realized that the big black part could fit inside a 1 x 4 brick if it's hollowed out. So I drew the key contours on paper and built a little stack of bricks that covered it.

I then rebuilt the stack with generous amounts of super glue between the bricks.

I marked out where the key was to protrude from the bricks and took out the drill.

Easy material to work with!

I begun hollow it out with knifes, but it was slow progress and hard work. So I took out the Dremel with an rotating aggressive file. That was noisy but fast!

Did not take me that long until the key fit snugly inside. I had to narrow down the walls of the bricks some, since the key was a bit thick..

Here you see the opening with the key inside. The little black square to the right is the chip.

The next step was to put a little something on the end to hang the key. Drilled two holes and bent a thick piece of metal wire to fit.

I hammered the ends down, amazing what abuse the plate could take! I was sure to ruin this one but it stood up fine.

Liberal amounts of epoxy resin was smeared all around inside, the key put back in and then topped it up with more resin. Attached the plate and let it set over night.

The next day I cleaned up some squeeze outs and was pleased with the outcome.

Oh, right! Warning: This blog post might be offensive to those who feel even the destruction of bricks worth $0.192 is bad. ;) MOD in this case stands for "My Own Destruction".

Instructionless

I decided to challenge myself a bit when building 9391 Mini Crane. The instructions were put aside (without browsing) and I was only allowed to see the photos on the box to build the set.

It went surprisingly well, all the parts was there and a lot of the parts could be traced from the photos. In the end I only made one mistake, I only used one bushing on the turret rotation knob instead of three:

One thing that got quite a bit confusing was where the support for the boom was suppose to be attached. I first attached it at the end of the beam with five empty holes until the brace, as it later turned out this is the correct way.

But while playing with the model I noticed that I could not lower the boom as much as the box photos. Upon closer inspection I noticed that the beam continues past the black mechanism in the photos. On the left it is also quite clear that there are only four empty holes. But built this way the supports collides with the bottom of the superstructure.

TLG has cheated with the model for the box photos (which is pretty common).

All in all this was a very fun little exercise and I will build more small sets this way in the future!

Bye bye christmas

Robotkampen 2011

Finally Robotkampen was planned for a day where work did not interfere so badly. We had not joined in on the LEGO robot competition since 2005, good thing we could participate in this tenth installment!

Lot's of things had changed since the last time. I've been more or less in a new dark age and it became quite clear that the NXT-kit was way better then the old RCX, especially since the motors now has rotation sensors built in. I bought a kit and had planned to look at both building and programming but time up to the competition was mostly spent on other things.

So coming to the competition ill prepared and finding a super hard task gave us much trouble. After over four hours and with 1½ hour until competition time our robot looked like this:

And since we did not have a robot to test the programming on not much was done there either. Ooops! :D

So what was the super hard task? Take a look at this photo:

The task was to move all red balls into the red hole, all the blue balls into the blue hole, all gray into gray and two yellow corner balls into the yellow hole. Each color earned different score based on how far the balls had to be moved. The red and blue could quite easily be knocked down into their holes but the gray and yellow needed to be collected and carried some distance.

I suppose I don't have to write that we did not succeed very well in this. We only got time to practice twice on the table, there were 21 teams queuing to do the same so time got even sparser. But we had a lot of fun!

Speaking of time getting sparse, 15:00 the robots had to be finished and placed on a certain spot. We did so with nine seconds left. :)

Here's my teammate Harri and our two fans Supermario and Nextuz.

The competition has begun!

The scoreboard after two competition runs. Max was 400 but the best team "only" managed 160. We got a mere 20. :)

Some of the 21 robots, the ones missing are getting fine-tuned for the finals.

The teams. Some had traveled half the country to get there!

Judge keeping track of the scores.

Our robot as it finally turned out. We did not use any sensor and only two motors after the motto Keep It Simple Sutpid. On the left (right in this photo) we put a ball carrier, to empty it we planned on going close to the hole so the balls fell out under it. Alas we never got that far. :)

Here's hoping Robotkampen 2012 also will be on a day where we easily can skip work! Until then I hope to find some real programming environment for the NXT and perhaps even get a few ours of practice. :D

SW Shooting range (everyday life)

MOC for a contest at Eurobricks. Create a Star Wars-themed "Everyday life"-vignette (this post as a topic there). Here's mine:

Playing back the security tapes from the recent Jedi "courtesy call" it became quite clear that the Stormtroopers could not aim their guns. Funds were set aside to create a shooting range for the Stormtroopers to practice their skills. The shooting range is now completed and it's quite easy to find; just visit the "green corridor" in the new Death Star.

You'll find a stair case leading up to the shooting range. Darth Vader himself took these stairs today. A meeting got cut short when he killed the other attendees (as he often tend to these days), so he decided to visit the shooting range. Enough about that, let's climb the stairs shall we?

Uh-oh! It seems Darth got his steam up and are busy killing yet another Stormie. But this is the engineer behind the new shooting range, what could have kicked Darth back into killing-minions-mode again?

Well, it should not have been the Stormtroopers who are busy at target practice?

...and it should not be the Stormtrooper who's busy downing an Ewok-burger. Eating those pesky little critters is standing orders.

Wait a minute... what the Hoth does the targets resemble!?!?

Duckons from Naboo? No surprise Darth felt compelled to get rid of the chief engineer!

Here's an overview of the whole scene (apart from the green corridor that's below the table and Darth):

And a few more not concerning about what's in the background (a huge pile of miscellaneous MTB-accessories).

And here's a video showing the different parts:

Happy Halloween!

There's a little fun contest going on at Eurobricks; spook up your SigFig/Avatar to celebrate Halloween. I turned mine into the head spin-scene from the movie the Exorcist. Back in 1973 that actually got people fainting!

It was my first take at stop-motion animation and a quick one at that, so the image jumps around a little and the light flickers. But hey!

Here's a still image.

And the original for comparison.

How I did it.

SweBrick XI the movie

The 11th LEGO-gathering among AFOLs in Sweden took place this past weekend. I was there on Saturday.

We had tons of fun! Here's some footage:

LEGO: SweBrick XI 2010-10-16 from Tobbe Arnesson on Vimeo.