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Ben might like this flying pig.
>> Ben might like this flying pig.
Not bad. The black mechanisms under the wings feel a little bit like cheating though, they’re very noticeable. Also, my flying pig is better 😛
In October it will have been five years since I created this thread. Right before BrickWorld, I thought “For the first time ever, I will finally be using this thread the way Greg intended and the way he uses his: I’ve built something, and now I will take a pic, and post that pic to the thread so that everybody can see what I built.”
I was thinking, of course, of my new GBC module, called Powerhouse v4.0. But I didn’t have time to post a pic before leaving for Chicago, and, as alluded to on the BrickWorld Chicago 2022 thread and the Studio thread, my module worked great at home and failed in the convention hall. At this point I don’t have any great pics of it and it’s been partially dismantled already. And really, it’s hard to generate any enthusiasm for posting a pic of a module that didn’t work. So we’re still gonna have to wait before I post a pic of something I’ve built to the thread.
I’ve already started designing v4.1 in Studio, to be taken to BFVA22 in early August. So we’ll hope I have a pic to post here for that. Overall, it will appear very similar to the last one, and some parts will transfer directly without change.
I do not plan to do GBC for BFPA22, because I want to be at the Steel City LUG table, and so I have big plans for that, and I already started designing in Studio back in May, before I had to switch gears (literally, ha!) to GBC. So that should be pics I can post here as well. Sweet.
PS – I forgot to mention that I also have a video that I took at my house of my module successfully processing about 100 balls. I told people that the idea was that when my module failed at the convention hall, and I told Tom it worked great at home and he rolled his eyes, I could show him the video. I actually did not expect at that point that it was gonna fail as bad as it did. (By comparison, my 2017 module also worked great at home but had a lot of problems in the convention hall, but that one worked well enough that it not only survived public hours, I took it to two more conventions unchanged before dismantling it.)
And of course, I did not show Tom the video. It’s not that he doesn’t really believe me, of course, it’s that it doesn’t really matter. The home testing is always done under ideal conditions – I have a level table, low humidity, cool temperature, and clean soccer balls. Apparently all that stuff can affect in subtle ways. And we still haven’t definitively determined what went wrong with my module. I have a plan to address what I thought was most likely the biggest problem.
This site is never going to accept the upload of a 4.5-minute video. For a module that never worked right, I don’t think it’s worth it to post it elsewhere and provide a link. So we’re still waiting on the next one.
And now, finally, after all this time… a photo of something I built.
For years now – and I don’t remember when it started – one of the things you get when you go to BrickFair is an avatar tile. The idea is you upload an image to the website, and that image will be custom printed onto a tile for you, which you’ll then receive in your goodie bag when you check in at the event. I think the idea was mostly for people to use images that somehow represented themself in some way, and then wear them on their brick badge. I know in the early days, Todd had trouble getting people to upload anything.
At some point, I was in Chris Giddens’ Flickr stream (Giddens is known, among other things, for designing the Star Justice set from 2008, and organizing the Moonbase displays at BFAL), and I saw that he’d posted his own design for his avatar tile, a computer pattern somewhat inspired by those used in the classic space sets. Since I didn’t have any ideas for what to do with my tile, I downloaded his design and had it printed, with the idea that I could use it in actual Space builds. I left a comment on the Flickr page that I was doing so, but I never got a reply.
I’d lost track of how many times I’d used that pattern (and I’m still not sure). The pattern is for a 2×4 tile, and at some point Todd shrunk the size to 2×3. I asked Giddens for a new design, but didn’t get a reply. I didn’t submit anything, and so the default is a tile with the BrickFair logo on it.
I finally met Giddens at BrickWorld Chicago last month, and we got on quite well. He had seen my comments on the tile, and was glad that I was using it. When I got back to my house, I noted that at some point, possibly just this year, Todd shrunk the tile size again, to 2×2. If I was going to submit something, I needed to take matters into my own hands.
I imported a .jpg of Giddens’ pattern into the drafting program of champions (AutoCAD 2002), traced it, and then split it into two halves, and then modified them so that they were distinct and worked in the space provided. I uploaded one for BFVA22 and the other I will get at BFPA22. The full image of both tiles has been uploaded to Flickr (where Josh and Walter have faved it), but I’ll post it here also.
This week I realized that I would want to take one of my actual Giddens tiles with me to BrickFair, so I can see how mine looks alongside it. The reason I don’t know how many of the Giddens tiles I have is because I never did a good job of putting them away when I got back from BrickFairs, so they’re still all over the place. Or at least they were. In the course of doing serious organizing in the last half year, I’ve found four of them. And that could be all of them. So I figured I would take those four at least and build them into some sort of vaguely classic space looking build, something real quick that’s basically just a guy at a really big retro-future-looking computer. And of course, it wasn’t really quick.
Part of it was that I got carried away adding every scientific device I could think of. I kept finding more cool LBG parts and thinking ‘Ooh, well I have to use that one.’ I went through something similar with the trans-red and trans-green, although I did show some restraint there (several parts got rejected). So it’s a little ridiculous. Rachel is not a fan of Pretend Space the way a lot of us in the LUG are, so I emailed her this pic with a message saying that I went out of my way this time to make my build as hyper-realistic as possible.
I’ll be taking it to BFVA to add my tile to it. At this angle, you can see three Giddens tiles, the edge of a fourth, and the naked studs where my tile will go. On the opposite side, our view is blocked by the astronaut’s head, but there is a plain LBG tile there as a place-holder until September. And it turns out that at BFVA, the DelVaLUG Moonbase display is a collab open to everyone, so I’ve registered it as a MOC and gotten approval to add it in.
And now, pics of something else I built.
Some years ago, somebody found knock-off GBC balls that glow in the dark. BrickFair and BrickWorld both do World of Lights, where all (or most of) the lights in the convention hall are shut off so we can see all the MOCs that the builders lit up, and so this is a great opportunity to run the GBC loop using glow in the dark balls, although the public does not see it, unless Hanlon and Hanlon take video.
I have never participated, other than to watch. I’m pretty sure the first time they did it was at BWC18. I haven’t had a working original module since 2017 (event kits don’t count). My build didn’t come together in 2018. I built nothing in 2019. Then the pandemic. Last August I took my space plants build to BrickFair. Last month my module failed and was pulled long before WoL happened. I do have an engraved brick for my badge that says ‘GBC Night Watch’ in glow-in-the-dark letters; once the glow fades, you can recharge it with a UV flashlight.
On the assumption that I will have a working module next week at BrickFair (except now I’m not sure I will), I decided to finally order a UV light on Amazon. The balls only glow if they’re periodically charged up by blacklight, and builders have found all kinds of ways to install them on their modules, and even built special modules designed to house a UV light.
I had to do some searching on Amazon. All the product descriptions and reviews talk about using the lights for parties, stage shows, and Halloween displays, but never once do they mention using them for charging up your glow-in-the-dark GBC balls. So not helpful. Eventually I settled on a 10W light for $20, which might still be overkill, although it might just do a super duper awesome job of making the balls the glowiest we’ve ever seen them, in which case, you’re welcome.
Amazon delivered today. So I took valuable GBC-building time to assemble a support housing for the UV light, so that it aims down at the intake container of my module. Anybody who’s tried to integrate non-Lego products into a Lego build knows that pretty much nobody else designs their products using LDU, and it can lead to a lot of awkwardness. This one worked out remarkably well. It’s all black Technic, and I didn’t really worry about what it looked like cause it’s gonna be in the dark. It is rather grim looking, it looks like it was rejected by the Pittsburgh Industrial Bridge Commission for being too ugly. When designing and building, I also had to prioritize speed over everything else, so it doesn’t collapse or fold up for easy transport, or even come apart easy. (Once I get the legs removed, it does reassemble easy, but getting them off is miserable.) That’s a problem to be solved for next year. This one is quite sturdy, which was my main concern. We’ll see it works out in the convention hall.
Wow Ben! I love the classic space computer. Do people often incorporate their printed tiles into builds they display? Todd will probably be impressed by your years-long planning 🙂
I noticed the design you uploaded looks different than the ones on the computer screen. Is it for two 2x2s then?
You should call your new blacklight module the “sanitization station” since UV light can be used to kill germs. 😀
I haven’t had a working original module since 2017
So I read this and was like “Hey, that can’t be right. You had a working module the last time I was at Brickfair VA.” They I realized that 2017 was the last time I was at Brickfair VA. Sigh.
>> So I read this and was like “Hey, that can’t be right. You had a working module the last time I was at Brickfair VA.” They I realized that 2017 was the last time I was at Brickfair VA. Sigh.
Yep, that’s right Mr. ‘Okay I’m not coming this year but *next* year I’ll be there’. That was when Rachel became my girlfriend, and it’s also when you, me, Rick, Greg, and Rachel went to Otani’s and I got a pic of LUGDoug with the onion volcano in the background. In fact, I’m not sure I ever posted that pic anywhere. Maybe I should put it on Flickr so we can put it in the Steel City LUG group pool. I’ll do it after BrickFair.
As mentioned in in the BrickFairVA 2022 thread, my module worked. Like, really really worked, and worked well. It worked better than all my previous module combined. After years of modules that leaked balls all over the place, or not getting a finished working module built in time for the event, or modules that failed outright in the convention hall, or modules that worked but were finicky and still required a lot of babysitting, I finally got one to work the way I’d hoped. It only took me 8 years.
As mentioned in previous posts and on the BWC22 thread, I thought I had an excellent module for BrickWorld Chicago, and it failed in the convention hall. In fact, it successfully moved zero balls. At that event, I had not taken my own balls or my own power supply, so I had to wait until Friday evening to discover that it wasn’t working as expected. Our attempted fixes didn’t work, and I pulled the module within 60 seconds of the start of public hours on Saturday morning. So even though at BFVA I left my house once again confident that I had an excellent module, I wasn’t taking anything for granted until it actually worked in the Dulles Expo.
This time, I took my own balls and power supply. On the second day, I ran a single ball through, which worked. I then declared to Rachel and Tom that my module performance at BrickFair represented an improvement of infinity percent over BrickWorld. Then I ran four-hundred balls through the module without issue. (Which actually isn’t a lot. Theoretically, the total number of balls for BrickFair public hours is 46800, although in actual practice it’s always significantly less than that.)
Friday evening was World of Lights, when we run the glow-in-the-dark balls through the system. My UV light stand worked great. More importantly, my module lost two balls in 70 minutes. In a real-life application, that wouldn’t be a good success rate, but in GBC, it is excellent. I’ve had modules that would lose two balls every 10-15 seconds, requiring constant attention and clean-up. I knew that the real test would be the next day. Public hours are much longer of course, and equally significant, the regular GBC balls are in much worse shape (meaning they’re very dirty and sometimes misshapen from being worn down through heavy use) than either my test balls or the glow-in-the-dark balls. But even so, World of Lights felt like victory to me.
During public hours, I got nervous when I lost a ball almost immediately, but the module settled into a pattern of again losing about 2 balls an hour. About an hour in, Tom congratulated me on finally having a module that worked well. I said I wasn’t sure I should relax until the end of public hours. He said ‘Your module could explode right now, and it would still represent a huge leap forward in your progress.’ And nothing bad ever happened, I was able to leave it for long stretches to help out in other areas of the GBC display.
I never directly witnessed a ball fall off my module, I only saw them hit the table, so I’m not sure what was happening. As far as I could tell, some minor vibration was shaking the tread enough to dislodge a ball. I’m hoping the problem will be easy enough to solve by extending one of the side rails out and then across to help hold the balls in (I was going to extend both sides, but Ralph pointed out that just one will probably work, and be less obstructive to the public view of the traveling balls). I did lose one ball more towards the bottom and I’m not sure what happened there either.
I told Tom that leading up to both Chicago and Chantilly, I had imagined doing an energetic victory dance when I finally got my module to work in the hall. But after my failure in Chicago, every time I hit a milestone of success in Chantilly, I was so relieved that I just sat there, not moving. Also, I’m getting old for victory dances. I never did one.
For those of you who aren’t aware, and maybe weren’t around back then, in 2016 I built an absolutely gigantic module, but did minimal testing on it, mostly because I ran out of time, but also because I used a technique that basically involved thinking ‘Well that should work’, which for GBC is woefully inadequate. My module at BrickWorld that year worked well enough to survive public hours, but it was a leakfest, with multiple major breakdowns and jams that had to be fixed on the spot. For BrickFair, I made some ‘improvements’, and added a significant expansion, and it performed so poorly that by the second day of public hours I abandoned it. But it was too big to move, and so they had to bucket brigade around it while I went to look at the other MOCs with my parents and young nephews. I’m pretty sure it’s the only time that Tom has been really unhappy with me.
Within a couple of weeks of the event, Tom sent out an email to me, Stuart, and Ian, proposing what he called ‘The Ben Good Rule’, which stated that any module that couldn’t be removed from the table in less than 30 seconds was required to have a built-in bypass. We all agreed the rule was a good idea, although I said that the rule name was highly questionable. But it did make me realize that instead of cramming lots of different ideas into my module right away, I needed to scale back and do one at a time, only adding a new one in when I’ve gotten the previous one to definitely work.
Back to 2022, at BrickFair Ian was unintentionally making me laugh when he came up to me and said ‘Ben, every time I see your GBC module, it’s gotten smaller.’ I said ‘I’m pretty sure Tom likes it that way, he wasn’t happy with me back in 2016 when that module failed.’ Ian said he missed the ‘behemoth’ that I’d brought in 2016, and said that the best revenge (his word, not mine) would be to bring back a behemoth module, but actually have it work this time. And I said ‘What do you think I’ve been working towards all this time?’
Recently I was thinking about the bypass. Originally I was thinking, well, my module isn’t big enough for one yet, and so I don’t need to worry about it until the module is big enough. But then I had a Brilliant Insight: I could do the bypass first, and then when I do need it, it’s already ready to go. Apparently it’s not the brilliant insight I thought it was though, because when I ran it by both Tom and Ian, their reactions made it clear that I was actually stating the obvious. Fine.
My module finally worked well enough that I can start thinking about expansion and a bypass. Apparently the idea still makes Tom nervous though. Rachel likes to tell me about the hedonic treadmill (I’d been familiar with the concept but not the name), in which things that are new and exciting to us eventually become familiar and commonplace, and therefore no longer new and exciting. During the first day I was excited that my module was working as planned. The second day I was thinking ‘You know, my module really doesn’t do a whole lot. I really should expand it.’ I told that to Tom, and he got a look of alarm on his face and said ‘I’m walking away now’ and walked away.
My module represented a visual improvement over the Chicago one as well. The support structures at the top and bottom were redesigned to be studless and hide some of the connecting beams that held them in place. The main ramp is also much better, I can’t explain it, so hopefully it’s visible in pics, but it has a certain elegance to it, or at least I like to think it does. The old one was made out of Technic beams because I was running out of time and I knew I could do it quickly, but it was ugly. I also finally made a sign for the top that says ‘Powerhouse’, which is the name of the module. I was able to do this thanks to finally having enough Amazon Rewards points to get the Typewriter set, which I then took along to VA. I already had an extra E, which I’d BL’ed for when it’s time to spell Febrovery, and so I just had to emergency BrickLink an O, which the seller was able to get to me on time.
I did not have time to redesign the intake container, so that’s a project for next year. I do need to clean it. As previously mentioned, the GBC balls accumulate a lot of dirt, especially if AFOL’s are using tires to move the balls, they get all black. At BrickFair, the previous module was dumping the balls into my module at a weird angle, causing them to hit a pretty specific spot on the side of the container, and you can see a big black mark where they were hitting. It’s really gross.
I’m not doing GBC for BFPA, and in October I’ll be busy preparing for Halloween. So I won’t return to GBC until November. But I hope to start doing Studio work at that time, rather than waiting until June to really get going on it, like I did this year. I have plenty of ideas to expand the module.
An additional issue is setup. My module broke into sections for transport, and at my house, they clicked together quite well. But assembling them means sliding them together. On my nice smooth banquet table at my house, this works well (it also works well on LUG tables, which I know from connecting MILSed baseplates). But BrickFair and BrickWorld use table clothes, and more importantly, Tom puts down additional padding because it helps absorb energy from falling balls – balls that bounce less are balls less likely to be lost. But it also makes it extremely difficult to slide large sections together, with the cloth likely to get pinched in between the new sections, keeping them from completely connecting (I also experienced this last year, when I reassembled the Space Plants build). So I need to come up with a plan that doesn’t involved sliding, and I have to admit, I don’t have one, despite giving it some thought. (I’m also taking MILSed plates to BFPA, so we’ll see what happens.)
For those of you for whom the previous post is tee-el-dee-ar, the important part is that my module worked well. Here’s a couple pics:
For those of you for whom the previous post is tee-el-dee-ar, the important part is that my module worked well. Here’s a couple pics, one post a time per usual. (Also, there was definitely some serious repair work going on nearby, cause the mess around the module is not mine. I’m not even feeding into anything at this point.)
And here’s a video showing part of the layout. The video is about 2 minutes long and I show up after the 1-minute mark. You only see one ball go through my module before they move on.
Beyond the Brick also posted this one shortly after the event. Like the previous video, it’s shot in vertical phone format, of which I’m not a fan. It’s also a little strange. As best I can tell, it’s a ‘quick’ video to hold people over until the full tour is released, which as of August 19, hasn’t happened. The video shows the GBC layout in action without commentary and keeps things moving, but the weird part is that they don’t do the whole loop. I’d estimate that it’s just under half. I don’t know why they didn’t keep going, and when people asked about it in the comments, they didn’t get a direct answer.
Fortunately, I made the cut. The video is 10:44 long. Shortly after the 8:20 mark, they take a break from following the line of modules and hold a shot of the front half of my module from a distance. Then they go back to the following the line, and they get to my module around the 9:20 mark.
Dae shot her video from outside the stanchions, and is able to pan out to include the whole module (although it makes the balls harder to see). John (who I assume shot the video, but I don’t know for sure, cause I don’t remember seeing it even though it’s clear that I’m sitting there) likes to shoot from inside the stanchions, which means he gets nice close-ups of most of the modules, but it also means he can’t back up if he needs to in order to get my module visible all at once (I’ve seen it happen before). We also only get to see one ball go through the module in this video before they move on, although it is a nice close view of the ball going down the ramp and down the chute. It’s the best view we have of the ramp, barring what we might see in the full video tour.
I also got my avatar tile, put it in my Space Computer Station build, and met Paul over at the DelVaLUG display. We included my build in their display for the duration of the convention. I posted at length about this one back on July 27, so there’s nothing to add, other than the avatar tile looked the way I’d hoped it would, and I was glad to be part of the DelVaLUG display. Here’s a couple pics:
I also got my avatar tile, put it in my Space Computer Station build, and met Paul over at the DelVaLUG display. We included my build in their display for the duration of the convention. I posted at length about this one back on July 27, so there’s nothing to add, other than the avatar tile looked the way I’d hoped it would, and I was glad to be part of the DelVaLUG display. Here’s the first of two pics:
And here’s a wider shot. There isn’t a shot wider than this, unless I took one myself. I haven’t gone through my own BFVA pics yet, I’m not optimistic about their quality. Last year my phone did pretty poorly in the available light.
That was a six-year saga and I truly enjoyed reading it. I laughed, I was in suspense, and then I cheered when the protagonist prevailed! Congrats @bengood921. I look forward to seeing Powerhouse in action IRL sometime.
Beyond the Brick posted their full tour of the BFVA22 GBC loop on Monday, link at the end. It’s more than 74 minutes long, and I finally finished watching the whole thing today. There’s a lot of cool modules, and the video is worth watching if you’re into GBC.
After appearing several times in the background, my module shows up for real around the 49:08 mark, and they start talking about it shortly thereafter. It gets considerable screen time, nearly two minutes before they’re on to the next module. They actually don’t have much to say about it, other than it works well, and it looks good. I already knew that Tom suffers from selective memory when it comes to past failures, which stems almost entirely from my BFVA16 module, and so he greatly overstates my lack of success in the past, which was hardly zero.
This post started to get really long-winded and I just deleted a lot out as unnecessary. I discussed the pros and cons of my previous modules, analyzed how to solve the problem of John always being too close to my module – which once again is a problem here – and my thoughts on doing my own commentary in the BTB videos for my own module, something that I’m sure will happen eventually. I’ll go into more detail on those topics in future posts if and when they become relevant. For now, I can sum it up as: I’m glad my module got good screen time in the video, but I can’t pretend that I’m thrilled with the results.
Incidentally, I briefly show up in the background when they’re discussing my module, despite my efforts to not be in the video. I had gotten drafted to babysit the area where all the event kit modules were while the guy who had been doing it went to lunch, and the module feeding into them kept failing, and so I kept going to get Al to come fix it, which is the guy in the orange shirt. He pulled the module the next day cause he was tired of repairing it and there wasn’t an easy fix to keep it from breaking.
The event kit modules show up at about 55:40. Mine’s the one decorated with space plants. After the first round of decorating, I told Tom that I was afraid that somebody might decorate theirs similarly and it would be confusing, so I added more space plants. I got a big eye roll for that one. I did have to rearrange them after they had to rearrange the order of the modules because a bunch of them failed, which they attributed to the knock-off motors having poor lubricant. Mine made it to the end.
John zooms and holds on mine more than once, which is unusual, maybe he’s really into space plants. The first time he does it is around 56:10, and then he returns to less than 15 seconds later. A lot of GBCers build 10x10x10 cups to catch the balls coming out of a module; we use them for things like emptying the system at the end of the convention, or to serve as a stopgap when a module is temporarily pulled for repairs. Mine is black and yellow and has Steel City LUG bricks on all four sides. Because I’d been monitoring that section (I left the area when they shot the video) and modules were having problems, I got a lot of use out of my cup, which I then accidentally left behind and gets decent screen time in the video, since it’s sitting right next to where the event kits dump into the next module. More glory to the LUG!
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