LEGO Digital Designer goodness

While prowling the internet I found this wonderful LEGO build site.  I was drawn in by the LEGO Tachikoma from Ghost in the Shell anime series seen here which is motorized and multi functional to boot.  It has a walk and a drive mode which I find quite a feat for model of this size. You should check out the video.  He has a few other bad ass builds i.e. the Batman Tumbler.

What really made me happy was that we graciously includes a build file for the LEGO Digital Designer.  I have seen it mentioned but never really checked it out.  But having the actual build plan for a motorized Tachikoma pushed me over the edge so I downloaded the LDD app to check out the build.  After downloading the installer I took a while to fetch a bunch of data for all the brick sets. But that is actually quite cool since it implies that the get updated and I have all the latest bits.  Which is good since I recently got my son the EV3 set.

Loading the model in LDD shows a very clever drive train and the two, no three
motors that power this thing. The power pack seems to be crammed into the pilot capsule on the back.

Anyway as is so happens I had sitting on my desk a EV3 powered Nerf C-18 remote senty turret. That had been sitting there the last 3-4 months. Due to the rather complex construction nobody had dared tear the thing down yet.  But now I see that I can simply encode this creation of mine electronically and save the build for future use or to share with the world in hope for some improvements. And here we can see the first round of building.  This time the color is not constrained by the available pieces. You are looking at the tilt mechanism provided by two big turntable pieces and the seat of the Nerf C18 which is mouted upside down so the handle bar actually sits in the seat.  The turntables are then powered by a worm drive on either side as the C18 is a pretty big an heavy toy.  This is not the complete unit so don't read to much into it.  

Making a build from an existing model is fairly quick process and work alot more smooth than I had expected.  All the pieces snap to each other (with a sound) and the software makes a fairly good work at figuring out what I'm trying to connect to.  It is not with out fault though.  The automatic hinge connector has not worked for me yet for doing the angular cross beams. Probably "doing it wrong".

My 8 year old son was pretty quick to get going and was building a space thing in no time. We was pretty happy about being able to color things like he wants and the his main problem was controlling the view, some quirky brick attaching and finding the right piece in the rather large collection.  Pretty much the same as I had :) In a few short minutes we got this.