3D scanner made entirely from Legos
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Mar 23rd 2009 11:01AM
posted Mar 23rd 2009 11:01AM
We've seen some pretty kick-ass Lego creations over the years, and this one is no exception -- if anything, it gets bonus points for not only being a pretty sweet hack, but for enabling sweeter, more complex, hacks in the future. The 3D scanner was built by Philo Hurbain, who was looking for a way to model complex Lego parts for use in the LDraw CAD program. This bad boy -- including drive components and sensors -- is entirely made from the colorful plastic toy, except for the probe needle (an old school sewing needle, apparently). The "brain" of this thing is Mindstorms NXT. But that ain't all! Check out the device in action as it models a tiny Lego frog -- video after the break.
[Via Make]
[Via Make]
The plural of LEGO, is LEGO.
Seriously. It's LEGO. If you really need to put an s in there, say LEGO bricks.
Coolness aside, did they just scan some guy's testicle?
The article said it was a small lego frog, but your assesment sounds much more correct judging by the picture on the screen...I mean it's pretty smooth and rounded for it to be anything made from legos
Does anyone have any evidence regarding this "plural of lego is lego" business. I mean, I agree that a pile of lego bricks is not "a pile of legos," but I'm not sure it's "a pile of lego" either. It seems like there may be no such thing as a "lego." I couldnt find any reference on the website to one or more lego bricks being referred to as either one lego or a plurality of lego.
Help please.
@Smart People Play Tuba
let me remind you that the probe is made of sewing needle. The subject may have a bit of a problem during the scan.
@ Market Data
http://stason.org/TULARC/games/mindstorms-lego/7-Plural-of-LEGO.html
I remember there being a link to the official site a few years ago too.
@ Dan
That's because it's one piece, hardly a little bigger than a stud.
@Me
If you want to play that game, you shouldn't put a comma after the first of the two LEGOs.
(Ha, I corrected you AND used LEGOs correctly. That's right, I just won a fight on the internet. Almost as awesome as saying "First" on the second post.)
I'm not sure which I find more annoying, people saying "legos" or "could care less"...
Don't worry its a common mistake made by americans
@Market Data
Yeah, you almost had the answer yourself. The evidence is that LEGO is a company or a system, so the product are LEGO bricks. You have a "pile of LEGO bricks", can be shortened to a "pile of LEGO" but not to Legos (Urggh!). Just like you have a pile of Mechano or a pile of fish.
Likewise, LEGO Technic is LEGO Technic... Engadget once screwed up and used 'Technics' in an article headline about LEGO. Technics make fricking turntables, for goodness sake! See an Engadget headline with 'Technics' and you expect an article about fricking record players from Panasonic nee Matsushita.
Journalists have a STYLE BOOK laying down to them how things should be done in their publication. Looks like Engadget need to write/update/find/enforce one.
It's plural LEGO! that's the second time I've had to post that :D
Notice how it's only Americans that use the plural "Legos"...
notice how its americans that invented legoS.
so suck my balls
jk i love the rest of the world :). and denmark is cool
The Danish are cool indeed. I was just fired up with my "Not everything is from America" speech ;-)
@adam,
Yup, just like the US invented the airplane, the radio, the telephone, the light bulb, the computer, basketball, democracy, apple pie, and government corruption. ;)
Seriously, though, the reason so many grown Americans call them Legos is because we played with them when we were very young children, and in case you don't remember what it's like to be 3 years old, you're not much into researching how to pluralize your favorite toy.
Parents didn't know any better because . . . oh, I don't know, lots of people over here didn't have any danish friends, and even if they did, the danes might not have been big enough jerks to correct their friends' kids. Compound that with--and this is the part that's going to shock you--we didn't have the internet back then, and looking that sort of thing up wasn't a simple matter. Seriously, if you lighten up a bit, it's easy to understand why many of us who played with Legos in the 70's and 80's never knew that Lego was the plural of Lego.
And now that we're adults, we feel like total tools saying things like "I used to love playing with Lego."
When you pronounce 'Legos' should you say:
Leg-os or Le-goes?
http://legos.com (LEGO has been very strict on making sure people know their name correctly, probably why it doesn't simply redirect).
@Bellzebub, it's leg-os (phonetically its like how you would prounance "leg" and say "O").
http://legos.com (LEGO has been very strict on making sure people know their name correctly, probably why it doesn't simply redirect).
@Bellzebub, it's leg-os (phonetically its like how you would pronounce "leg" and say "O").
(... Engadget really needs to put a simple 30sec limit in between posts to prevent someone from accidentally double clicking "Add Comment")
Weird americans cant spell potato either.
You guys all sound like coporate schills.
Yes, according to the "LEGO" company, the name is "supposed" to always be in capitals. If we were supposed to guess that by the logo alone then a litany of companies should be spelled with all capitals.
And, yes, technically, if anything should be pluralized it should be LEGO bricks, with LEGO as an adjective. But if that were true then there could be no such things as Treos. Palm wants insists that it should be the Treo smartphone, which no one uses. Not all smartphones are Treos, but all Treos are smartphones.
And you're assertion that "The plural of LEGO, is LEGO." is also incorrect. Lego is a brand and a brand can't be plural. So, "LEGO are cool" is exactly as incorrect as "Legos are cool."
So I choose to say, "Legos." At least it sounds gramatically correct.
BTW, page 19 (the last page) of the company's 2007 profile includes their plea -
http://cache.lego.com/downloads/aboutus/LEGO_company_profile_UK.pdf
video gone.
What people do with these things...
That's cool.
I fully believe that the cure for cancer/aids (cancer-aids?) will somehow involve LEGO. Is there anything they can't do?
get you laid
Sure they can!
Little boys will do anything to get their grubby little hands on some LEGO!
well, if you think about it...
I'm pretty sure someone has made a teledildonics device from LEGO bricks already.....if not, it's probably just a matter of time.
@ryback
wonder how you found -that- out :\
my eggo
Ohhh... comment to late. Joke ruined :-(
its cool, but considering the components it is using, i think you could build the same thing with radioshack parts and a arduino board for cheaper....I mean lego is as overpriced as Mac...the mindstorm starter kits go anywere from like 400-1000 bucks. Just saying...
Ya...I'm jealous I don't have one...you caught me -_-
*an arduino board....
Mmmm, lego(s). Noobs.
I want one!!
You know, that's not a scanner but a CMM (coordinate measuring machine). The difference is that the CMM touches various points on
the object it is measuring and records the coordinates (it records the coordinates when the needle touches the object).
Thus, it would be really difficult or impossible to measure a really complex geometric structure, since you'd need thousands of contact points. However, on simpler geometric objects it works really well.
A scanner uses a laser or radiowaves or sound (depending on the system and purpose of the machine) to measure an object that can be quite complex...
A CMM can be programmed to "scan" just the same. Scanning doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to touch the part. As a matter of fact, just because there are methods that don't touch the workpiece doesn't mean they gather different data. They still generate the same point cloud. The advantage of physical touching is you get better accuracy, the downside is the slower speed.
Bottom line, you can generate the same dataset by either method.
PS, radio waves and sound don't seem like optimal methods for measuring small things, only large things like planets and the bottom of the ocean with any accuracy. Ultrasound doesn't have the accuracy you need other than taking pictures inside your body and it mostly uses the doppler effect to image. The commercial CMM systems (scanners as you say) I have seen either use lasers, monocular vision systems which read manually placed dots or interference patterns, or binocular vision systems that don't need much extra other than taking a lot of pictures and doing some fancy math.
what exactly is this thing? i don't think i am tech savvy enough to understand what i am looking at. can someone please explain in lay terms?
That 's the worst scan of a computer mouse I've ever seen!
It's a device that pokes a small object with a needle, measuring how far it can poke, while rotating the small object. Then uses that data to create a 3D model from it.
I have trouble making a platform with wheels that don't fall off. These serious lego engineer guys totally awe me.
That Sony VAIO is the future.
That's actually a pretty sweet model of Vaio. I think it's either a PCG-FX215. I had one for 7 years until I gave it to Mom. I very reluctantly replaced it. Make fun of it if you wish, but my '01 FX215 running XP with max RAM and a newer CPU could hold it's own against newer Vaios running Vista.
I watched that entire video and I saw no proof that it was doing anything at all. It was just an overly loud motor spinning a wheel every ten seconds. What the hell is so impressive about it?
yep, thinking same thing here.