Friday, July 14, 2006
OT: LEGOs
(Very off-topic for this blog, but I figured the audience would appreciate it more than that of my personal blog.)
I've always been a big fan of LEGOs, but recently I've started to descend (ascend?) the slippery slope towards a LEGO fanatic. It's certainly blossoming as a major hobby.
I think part of what has expanded my interest recently is the discovery of ways to combine my passion for LEGOs with my love of computers. Aside from the obvious eBay auctions and fansites, there are some great utilitarian sites for LEGO enthusiasts. Peeron inventories parts, sets, and instructions. Parts Catalog lets you inventory your LEGO pieces much better than a simple spreadsheet.
The real time-waster, though, is MLCAD (Mike's LEGO CAD) which is part of the LDraw standard. LDraw is actually an old DOS-based CAD program that has been built-upon over the years. MLCAD is a Windows app that gives you all of the LEGO parts in a rather nice interface, where you can build sets. There's a lot of features I haven't tried yet, and other utilities to play with (e.g., POV-Ray for rendering).
Last night I test drove MLCAD by creating a simple Truck model (317-1) using instructions from Peeron. It took me about 90 minutes to create. The resultant file is actually just plain text:
I've always been a big fan of LEGOs, but recently I've started to descend (ascend?) the slippery slope towards a LEGO fanatic. It's certainly blossoming as a major hobby.
I think part of what has expanded my interest recently is the discovery of ways to combine my passion for LEGOs with my love of computers. Aside from the obvious eBay auctions and fansites, there are some great utilitarian sites for LEGO enthusiasts. Peeron inventories parts, sets, and instructions. Parts Catalog lets you inventory your LEGO pieces much better than a simple spreadsheet.
The real time-waster, though, is MLCAD (Mike's LEGO CAD) which is part of the LDraw standard. LDraw is actually an old DOS-based CAD program that has been built-upon over the years. MLCAD is a Windows app that gives you all of the LEGO parts in a rather nice interface, where you can build sets. There's a lot of features I haven't tried yet, and other utilities to play with (e.g., POV-Ray for rendering).
Last night I test drove MLCAD by creating a simple Truck model (317-1) using instructions from Peeron. It took me about 90 minutes to create. The resultant file is actually just plain text:
0 Untitled
0 Name: Truck (317-1).ldr
0 Author: MLCad
0 Unofficial Model
0 ROTATION CENTER 0 0 0 1 "Custom"
0 ROTATION CONFIG 0 0
1 4 -30 -32 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3023.DAT
1 4 10 -32 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3023.DAT
1 7 -10 -32 -70 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3020.DAT
1 0 -40 -32 30 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 -40 -32 150 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 20 -32 150 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 20 -32 30 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 -50 -32 90 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0 3020.DAT
1 0 30 -32 90 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0 3020.DAT
0 STEP
