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Hello all,
I just wanted to introduce myself. I have played with Legos since I was a little kid, but now that I am all grown up and a father of 3 boys I am playing again. My wife got a new job and is travelling a lot more. I struck up a deal that when she comes back from work trips she buys me Legos. I enjoy having more time with my kids, but it is also exhausting. So the Legos help me decompress.
The most recent set I got was the Express Passenger Train 60337. It is very fun.
Anyway, my day job is working for a medical robotics company. I manage a prototyping shop which is fun.
Hi J, I hope you saw that we have a display at the PA Trolley Museum in Washington PA this weekend and next. The weather will be spectacular today – a great opportunity to take those three boys to see the LEGO display, meet some LUG members and see some fall colors while riding the trolley! If you are too busy, you can go next weekend also.
P.S. I hope you are into LEGO robotics soon. 🙂
@greg Thanks for letting me know about the Trolley Museum. I will look into it further. This weekend was already pretty full but perhaps I can take the boys out to see it next weekend.
I have been involved with Lego Robotics a little over the years. I coached a team while I was in high school and also another team while in college. Since I moved to Pittsburgh I have not done anything with lego robotics but have helped the high school teams with BotsIQ which is similar but not using legos.
If anyone knows of programs that need support let me know.
If anyone knows of programs that need support let me know.
@jupdyke the Schubert’s Unfinished list needs some support, including “The Claw” from Toy Story, MIBO the robotic dog and the Caravan elevator … all works in progress. I may be consulting your assistance in the future.@greg Happy to help on anything I can. I manage a prototyping shop at work so we have lots of fun toys. It is a little unrelated to lego but might have some opportunities for cross over too.
We have some really nice measurement tools and 3d printers, cnc milling machines, laser cutter and even 3d scanners. I also have an injection molding machine in my garage I need to fix one day.
A few random ideas I had were the following:
Using our pull testing machine to actually push and pull Legos and measure the forces. Perhaps compare to megablocks and tyco blocks.
Use the 3d printer to make some custom parts. Name tags, or some swag for the group. I donno.
We have a laser cutter that can engrave on things too. So wood plaques or leather keychains for the club.
I saw someone do a oled display for the their trains that actually read the real train arrival / departure data and updated the little display on their train display. Might be cool for a train display to show the Pittsburgh T-Shedule
Josh
We have a laser cutter that can engrave on things too.
@jupdyke are you able to engrave Lego bricks? There are some outfits which do Lego brick engraving (which we use for name badges, etc.) but it would be nice to have a more local source.
Also, can the laser cutters cut “soft” materials like foam? I need to cut a logo for one of my buildings (K&L Gates) and I have some blank peel and stick sticker sheets (probably about 1/4 inch thick) from which I want to cut the logo. Doing it by hand would not be precise enough. Just curious.
@timf I do have a cnc mill that could engrave on legos. I have never tried that but I have engraved on aluminum and it worked fine. So I would assume we can do it.
The laser can cut foam. I have only tried cutting EVA foam but I dont see why it would not work on other foams too. I would just google Glowforge Laser Cutter and see if someone else has done it and what settings they recommend.
I work in the strip district so if you could drop off the materials we could easily give it a shot. I would just need a .svg file of the design you want cut out. There is a good free program called inkscape that lets you created .svg files easily.
Let me know if you want to give either of the ideas a shot.
Josh
The laser can cut foam. I have only tried cutting EVA foam but I dont see why it would not work on other foams too. I would just google Glowforge Laser Cutter and see if someone else has done it and what settings they recommend.
I work in the strip district so if you could drop off the materials we could easily give it a shot. I would just need a .svg file of the design you want cut out. There is a good free program called inkscape that lets you created .svg files easily.
Let me know if you want to give either of the ideas a shot.
Thank you, Josh. I’m not super tech-savy so I’ll need to see if I can figure out creating .svg files (that is a format I’ve not encountered before). 🙂
It’s going to take some getting use to, for me, having not to respond to “Josh”, but glad to have you! Happy to hear about all your tech, interests, and MILS knowledge already!
@timf A .svg is just a scalable vector graphic. So it just means a image file that you can scale up without it looking all pixelated or grainy. You can think of it as just another image file format similar to .jpeg or something like that.
Honestly, if you can just share any image file with me of what you want I can probably convert it in a matter of minutes and show you what it would look like. Then we could try using the laser cutter.
I was also thinking it might be cool to take the club logo and make some leather keychains with it on them. If I have time before this weekend maybe I will test the idea out.
@joshhall Yeah it is odd having more than one Josh, maybe I need to pick a nickname. lolJosh
Here is a picture of the logo on the K&L Gates Center building. Also, here is the logo. I figure a foam sticker of the letters would work well on my MOC. I would need to measure my MOC to figure out how big the letters should actually be.
@timf That is very possible to do. Just let me know how big you want the design to be. I will look around and see if I can find some material. But honestly this seems like a super easy project.
Hello Josh! Welcome!
I just had an adventure getting my laptop set up to communicate with an old RCX 2.0 brick. A series of unfortunate events (and archaic software) resulted in a fragile, but functional VM.
I like your brick smashing idea. I can probably find a few Tyco blocks for destructive testing!
Our next quarterly meeting is Dec 10th at the Northland Public Library if you’re interested.
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