this is a model of the Frankfurt Train Station in Germany. It is still inprogress, and built by a guy by the name of Reiner - a very quiet person with a quick smile, but one heck of a builder. The model will have four more buildings like this when completed, so it will be in progress for a while. But it looks beautiful!
This is a lineup of vehicles that were built by Juergen Bartosch - yes they are lit by LEDs! The fire engine lights were remotely controlled to switch on and off. The person who modded the bricks for the lights also lit up and motorized the aircraft carrier. For the carrier, controls were developed for a laptop. Really impressive - and I was lucky enough to get one of the lit smart cars!
Here's the MINDSTORMS setup - with the one armed bandits and in the middle, an NXT line plotter:
printing in progress. What was neat was the paper feed used a light sensor to setup - you placed a sheet so teh light saw the edge and the paper fed, then stopped when it found the other end and reversed to place the paper for plotting.
The plotting program was actually pretty short (only five or six blocks of NXT-G)...it was the characters that took up the space - 26 characters and numbers had to be defined. It was really neat to watch though....
A funny aside - there were eggplotters, but Mike, the builder of those found out out that eggs were out of sason, so he didn't have any to demo!
Here's a look at some of the other bandits that were running - the black one not only played the game, but kept track of the number of tokens you won - when you were done, you hit a button and it would drop out the tokens. On the left was a robot that was used for the FIRST LEGO LEague Challenge for last year, Ocean Odyssey.
If you were a minifigure and lookde upfrom Holger Mattes' church, you'd see this.
There's more pics here.
Now, on to another place....
I was in Bilund for all of a day and a half. During that time, I discussed BrickJournal with the LEGO Group, and some pretty positive developments are happening. I also got to talk to Jamie Berard and Nathanael Kuipers, two set designers, and eat dinner with them. More on that in another entry, as the thing I want to talk about here is the Idea House.
The Idea House is basically the LEGO Archives. Serving as a museum, it is in the process of being changed to a museum space, with displays of LEGO items from the beginning to the present - it's a trip through the LEGO group's history and a place of reference for the employees. So what's there?
There are sets from the 50s...
toys from the Wooden Age....
a model designed by Kjeld (he likes fast cars!) Kristiansen,
a single-digit set - that's old!
and for something new:
some models from the Big Whit Brick Dump in Oslo.
Yes, you'll see more of all of these in BrickJournal, but not sure when....
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