Details: It's hard to believe that 2010 is coming to an end. We've shared one model here for each of these past 365 days, and it looks like we're good to go for another year. I'm sure that most of my readers are familiar with the popular New Year's ritual of watching a large object dropped near a crowd in a large city - you may also be aware of the annual TV special that features the "ball" dropping in New York City's Times Square. Here we see the best part of that captured in LEGO form (sorry, Justin Bieber fans - most of us only tune in for the countdown). The "ball" here looks great, thanks to the mix of clear plates and translucent 1x1 round plates - apparently it's a variation on the design that Legohaulic provided instructions for. This model will be on display in the Rockefeller Center LEGO store for the month of January, 2011.
Details: Word on the street is that there is some sort of football tournament going on now. Oh, not that type of football? Oh well. This spectacular sculpture is roughly life-size and is spot-on. It was an attempt at reverse-engineering a similar model by the slightly more famous Nathan Sawaya. On a side note, this is exactly the sort of sculpture I recommend you start out with if you're interested in experimenting with LEGO sculptures - although the brown parts can be hard to come by, the quantity of parts used here is actually pretty reasonable. Nathan Sawaya's version only used about 500 pieces - well within reach even if you have a fairly small collection. The most challenging part of this sculpture is the laces - they're made out of Technic 1x2 bricks with jumper plates attached. You connect the studs directly into the side of the Technic bricks.
Details: The NXT 2.0's color sensor and disturbingly large quantity of Bionicle zamor spheres makes the kit perfectlysuited for machine guns and machines that sort balls by color. The builder I'm featuring today decided to try a few ball-sorter designs from the Internet and a few original designs. You can see four of Robin Newman’s designs at the link above, along with videos, code, building instructions, and information about what sets and parts you would need to build each version.
I know we're already running late, but in celebration of National Robotics Week in the US, we will be featuring additional robot-themed models this week.
Details: Color sorters aren't exactly new, but I think we all knew that the newer version of the NXT kit (the 2.0 kits include a color sensor) would lead to more designs, some of which would inevitably improve on what we've seen before. This one, with it's zany (but somehow perfect) angles and fast linkages, may be the fastest NXT-based color sorter possible. There are some clever mechanisms here for splitting the stationary set of balls into a stream of individual balls and for changing the ways that the balls fall. The video here is pretty exceptional at really capturing the details (I'm sure we've all had enough of Technic-related videos that don't show you enough to see all of what's going on). Building instructions and code (both NXC and NXT-G) are available from the link above.
I've written about ball sculptures before, but the sad truth about round LEGO items is that they don't generally roll. This one, however, does. The video says it all, although you may have to squint a bit to make out how some of the plates with clips fit in.
Details: I know I've featured globes before (for some reason the regular search feature here can't find them, but mine as a blog author turns them up here and here, and for some reason a search doesn't turn up the globe tag), but this one is a bit more accurate - it was painstakingly designed with an atlas and a CAD program. As a studs-up ball with brick height (instead of plate height) resolution, it's already a reasonably complex model, but plates and bricks in various colors give the Earth a surprising amount of texture.
Details: I'm suprised that Nannan hasn't promoted this himself. It's a lovely creation with a nice mix of complex construction and a simple appearance. The "car" is propelled fowards by a means of magentic traction (well, not really, but you have to admit it makes for a sweet concept-car model.)
Nannan has also managed to fit a non-production Lego Star Wars helmet into this creation. What more could he do to appeal to my nerdy need to find great uses for rare parts?
It's hard to believe that 2010 is coming to an end. We've shared one model here for each of these past 365 days, and it looks like we're good to go for another year. I'm sure that most of my readers are familiar with the popular New Year's ritual of watching a large object dropped near a crowd in a large city - you may also be aware of the annual TV special that features the "ball" dropping in New York City's Times Square. Here we see the best part of that captured in LEGO form (sorry, Justin Bieber
fans - most of us only tune in for the countdown). The "ball" here looks great, thanks to the mix of clear plates and translucent 1x1 round plates - apparently it's a variation on the design that Legohaulic provided instructions for. This model will be on display in the Rockefeller Center LEGO store for the month of January, 2011.
's color sensor and disturbingly large quantity of Bionicle 
makes the kit 
