LEGO building LEGO

January 4, 2007 6:24 PM

While thinking about nanotechnology, Jamais Cascio found a six-minute YouTube video of a LEGO Mindstorms factory that builds a LEGO car.
posted by cgc373 (26 comments total)

The end sure seemed anticlimactic.
posted by pjern at 6:36 PM on January 4, 2007

Wow, what a car.
posted by billysumday at 6:38 PM on January 4, 2007

wake me when it can build itself.
posted by delmoi at 6:45 PM on January 4, 2007

I liked this comment from youtube:

Rudmin, a 6 year old would get bored after making 2 or 3 of those cars.

A machine could do thousands. Imagine what we could do with that many Lego cars. You truly have no vision.

But really, it would take less time to build the cars by hand then to carefully arrange all the little lego blocks by hand in the pallets.
posted by delmoi at 6:52 PM on January 4, 2007

Did you see how many RIS controllers there were? Wow!
posted by furtive at 6:55 PM on January 4, 2007

That settles it, I'm making my girlfriend get me the NXT for my birthday. After a decade and a half it is time to get back into Lego.

But really, it would take less time to build the cars by hand then to carefully arrange all the little lego blocks by hand in the pallets.

I think you are missing the point. Keep looking...
posted by lovejones at 7:00 PM on January 4, 2007

wow. That's a lot of Lego pieces in general, and probably the most Mindstorm controllers I've seen in one room. Very neat idea, and very cool to watch.


*insert C3PO quote about droids building droids, and what a terrible thing it is*

and on preview...what furtive said.
posted by niles at 7:00 PM on January 4, 2007

That is a massive monument to the power of geek. The only complaint I have is that it would have made for a more compelling video if it ran at about 3x the speed. And if they let the video run about 5 seconds longer so that, after all that work, you could see the car race off the end of the table.

And I would have added in a violent car crashing sound as it hit the floor.
posted by quin at 7:07 PM on January 4, 2007

wow
that was awesome
posted by cmicali at 7:24 PM on January 4, 2007

quin: my thoughts exactly.

Also, if the video were shot by small Mindstorms-controlled cameras...
posted by Foosnark at 7:33 PM on January 4, 2007

I missed the part where Tom Cruise escapes from the federal agents.
posted by SPrintF at 7:37 PM on January 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

According to the German part of the text accompanying the video, it was done by students in the equivalent of high school, which is pretty neat.

Wake me when it can built itself

Given how monstrous a simple car-making machine is, I imagine a machine for making a machine would take up the whole room. Which would be freakin' sweet.
posted by jedicus at 7:43 PM on January 4, 2007

If the car had been shown hitting the ground, this would be "Art".... Whitney Biennal level, big money art. But it has got to crash...
posted by R. Mutt at 7:49 PM on January 4, 2007

R. Mutt, heh.

Lots of work went into this. It's very specific to making cars. It would be cool to have a robot arm that was able to twist and turn the half-built component so that arbitrary pieces could be added to any location. Thus you would have a more generic LEGO thing building robot. Although the car assembly line has a nice 1970-era Japanese car marker nostalgia to it.
posted by bhouston at 8:01 PM on January 4, 2007

I work for National Instruments, which makes the software powering the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. I've seen a lot of MINDSTORMS demos, and nothing comes close to this. My mind is blown.
posted by lunalaguna at 8:12 PM on January 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

HFS! I love how it seems well-planned, up to the part of the car leaving the assembly line.
posted by drezdn at 8:25 PM on January 4, 2007

If the car had been shown hitting the ground, this would be "Art".... Whitney Biennal level, big money art. But it has got to crash...

My thoughts exactly! Submit the thing to a gallery somewhere, run it all day, periodically refilling the pieces until a large mound of crashed cars lies at the table ledge.
posted by odinsdream at 8:32 PM on January 4, 2007

jedicus: According to the German part of the text accompanying the video, it was done by students in the equivalent of high school, which is pretty neat.

Wow, that's really impressive. I bet they could get a full ride to some prestigious engineering college if they submit this video along with their application.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:01 PM on January 4, 2007

I think he should build a machine that takes the new car, breaks it apart piece by piece and then places the bricks back into the storage area.
posted by uftheory at 9:11 PM on January 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wow. That's all I have to say, wow. Now I want a NXT kit.
posted by mrbill at 9:59 PM on January 4, 2007

I don't care what anyone says. That was freaking awesome.

I'm sure it took the students many weeks to design and build that machine. But now that they have it, they can automate the process of playing with Legos. So in the long run, it's acutally a time saver. How clever those Germans are!
posted by Loudmax at 10:10 PM on January 4, 2007

Take a close look, folks. You're witnessing the birth of Skynet.
posted by Mikey-San at 11:28 PM on January 4, 2007

I dunno, Mikey-San. Seems to me Skynet might have started inside the house.
posted by cgc373 at 11:41 PM on January 4, 2007

Mouth agape.
posted by Mikey-San at 11:44 PM on January 4, 2007

Here's a machine that can build most of itself.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 5:06 AM on January 5, 2007

That. Was. Too. Cool.

The amount of work and thought that went into this blows the mind. I got the NXT starter set for my birthday last July and haven't had time to do more than assemble the first kit out of ... this makes my fingers itch to get back to it. Damn having to make a living anyway!
posted by Zinger at 10:43 AM on January 5, 2007