I'm a bad person. I did a bad, bad thing.
I bought me some Lego.
(heeheehee)
I marched into ToysRUs, wandered up and down the place for a bit,
pretending to be interested in the Batman action figures (pah) before
returning to the shelves, grabbing a couple of the (bigger) boxes, and
marching out. (there was a paying bit, but that's boring so I'm not
mentioning it).
There is method in my madness, however. I have as a little pet project
the intention of making a solar-powered sweeping robot to clean the
(wooden) floors in my new flat (which I move into in two weeks). And I
shall make it out of Lego. But the lego robot unit I want to use
doesn't come out until mid-September (I'm waiting for the new one), so
I figured a radio control version would be a good halfway-house - I can
do the prototyping work on it, then build in the robot bit later.
Granted, a radio-controlled floor-sweeper won't make the job any less
time-consuming, but I figure it'll be kinda fun to zoom it round the
house from the comfort of my sofa (which I don't yet own).
Lego sure has come a long way in the last..er... fifteen years. I'm not
sure I approve wholeheartedly... but I was once again struck by just
how sublimely flexible the whole system is. And I was doubly struck by
the extreme cleverness of the people who put together these kits. All
of a sudden, some apparently-random components (which elsewhere in the
design are used for mechanical transmission, or bridging a gap)
suddenly coalesce into a pretty good-looking engine grille!
But I am feeling a leettle bit thwarted. The radio controlled car comes from a series called
'Racers', which is clearly designed to be rather meatier than the
normal stuff, and is only just barely compatible
with the regular bits. In fact, the regular Lego Technic dumper truck I
also bought looks rather tiny and pathetic next to this brute. And then
there's the tiny problem that the radio-controlled car goes about
twenty times as fast as I want my floor-sweeper to go... and
all the gearing and steering bits for the RC car are inside a
sealed unit! This is Lego built for brutality, and not for
flexibility. I disapprove. I'll just have to take it into work and open
up the sealed unit, that's all. Irritating, though.
Nonetheless - Lego! Mine! Fun! And total guilt, of course. I mean, a thirty-year-old man, playing with Lego...
On unrelated topics, the TV in my flat has died. This is very annoying,
as it's not mine, and the owner is in India and comes back in two
weeks. I'm mildly annoyed at the idea of living without TV for that
time, but what am I supposed to do? I could try and get it fixed, I
suppose - but she might want to buy a new one, and anyway, I'm
reluctant to spend my money on something which was clearly on its way
out (it's been playing up for a while).
No, you're right, I should try and get it fixed. Damn. How annoying.
And... I'm still ill. Damn these useless freakin'
drugs, they're hopeless. Look - on Sunday I got up late, I went to
ToysRUs on the aforementioned mission, I went for a bit of a drive
around for an hour or so, then I came home. I felt tired and went to
bed - at SEVEN. And I stayed there 'til NINE this morning. That is
all it took to completely exhaust me. That's not
good at all. This is one reason why I went out and bought this stupid
stuff - to make me feel a bit better about feeling tired all the time.
This really sucks.
13 comments:
sounds like a trip to the doctors tomorrow is in order. We can't have you feeling so whacked for so long. I trust Sir has tried whisky?
I'm surprised no one makes body kits for Lego-fiends to Blig-up their works of art.
Good luck with the robot, though.
Yes, exactly what Jon said. We don't like your being sick.
I'm glad you snatched up some Legos though! That sounds like a great project! Too bad they don't have a Lego TV kit. I glanced at the Legos yesterday while perusing the store.
//And then there's the tiny problem that the radio-controlled car goes about twenty times as fast as I want my floor-sweeper to go... and all the gearing and steering bits for the RC car are inside a sealed unit!//
Suggest adding your own drivetrain to gear down the wheels. should be able to do that by using a friction drive (pushing the wheels up against another set of wheels, which then drive the gearbox).
You can probably do something similar to extend the steering linkage. As long as the steered wheels aren't also the drive wheels, you could clamp a steering linkage onto them.
Basically, you end up building your sweeper around the car chassis and mechanically coupling it to the important bits.
Yeah, that's my plan. Planning to drive the whole thing backwards, and having a couple of rotating sweeper arms driven by friction from the car's rear (now front) wheels.
I'm still quivering with outrage at the fact that the normal Technic gears won't fit on the RC axles, though. I guess they had to beef up the RC stuff to take high speeds, but I'm still disgusted. Two bits of Lego that are incompatible! It's wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Thanks for all your well-wishing, everybody - I have a hospital appointment on Friday anyway, but I'm of half a mind to phone them up and try and get it moved forward. I'm supposed to be moving house twice in the next three weeks, fer chrissakes! How am I suppoesd to do that when I feel like I'm trapped under something heavy?
I spent so many hours playing Legos as a kid. I think half the reason I agreed to have kids myself was so that I can play Legos with my son without feeling any guilt.
Bah..Guilt schmilt. I bought Play-Doh last month, and I don't have kids. Didn't have any guilt. Hehe.
I never liked the smell of Play-Doh, for some reason.
Me, either. There is a (most likely very expensive) women's perfume which smells exactly like play-doh. I can only assume that the women who buy this product never went to playschool.
Well if the robot plan doesn't pan out, I can think of something you could make a sofa from.
Hm...You and Salachair's response about Play-Doh makes me want to create a post.
So, you're not planning to sweep under the furniture then? ;-)
Now that my kids are teenagers, I've got a loft full of Lego, probably my favourite being the Technics Space Shuttle, with working cargo bay doors, robot arm, deployable satellite, undercarriage, control surfaces rocket fibre-optics...all powered by a couple of motors and a really neat gearbox.
I have an early original Mindstorms, plus a couple of the Spybotics devices I'm hoping to "network" with the Mindstorms RCX - maybe I'll give the sweeper-bot a shot too!
A few years ago when I had a Visual C++ environment on my PC, I managed to integrate the Mindstorms Spirit OCX into an application, where I drove a Lego little rover around wirelessly using my force-feedback joystick on the PC, and when it bumped into stuff, the joystick shuddered - great fun!
Even got some pneumatics, but that requires a dedicated motor to drive the compressor, and I have no way of actuating the valves except by hand, so no use for remote or autonomous vehicle.
Blimey abs! That's some serious techno shit. I'm in awe.
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