Lego Creator - PC Games LEGO Loco - PC Games LEGO Island - PC Games LEGO Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge - PC Games LEGO Island Xtreme Stunts - PlayStation 2 Lego Stunt Rally - PC Games Lego Racers - PC Games Lego Racers 2 - PC Games Lego Rock Raiders - PlayStation Bionicle - Game Boy Advance Bionicle: Matoran Adventures - Game Boy Advance Bionicle: Maze Shadows - Game Boy Advance Lego Knights' Kingdom - Game Boy Advance LEGO Creator: Harry Potter - PC Games LEGO Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets... - PC GamesIt could be the biggest bargain on the property market: a two-storey house that’s being given away for nothing. The only drawback is that this des res is made entirely out of Lego – and you’ll have to find somewhere to put it.Top Gear presenter James May has just built the world’s first full-size Lego house – including a working toilet, hot shower and a very uncomfortable bed – using 3.3million plastic bricks.
Toy storeys: James May and 1,000 helpers built the 20ft-tall Lego house on a wine estate in Surrey Stripe me: A close up of the fully functional house, which was built using 3.3million differently coloured bricks About 1,000 volunteers built the 20ft-tall house in Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking, Surrey – but now the vineyard needs the land back toIf no one collects it by 8am on Tuesday, it will be hacked to bits with chainsaws. May says Legoland reneged on a deal to take it to their theme park in Windsor, Berkshire, after deciding it would be too expensive to move. Meanwhile, miffed Legoland managers criticised May for building the house without their help.May said: ‘I’m very unhappy about it. I feel as if I’m having my arm twisted into saying “knock it down”. Blocked sink: The bathroom with a working taps and basin made from Lego Cosy: James in the bedroom - and you'll never guess what he made the bed, pillows and slippers from!
Purrfect: The home even comes with its own cat ‘Legoland only told us on Thursday they were not going to take it. Block head: The TV presenter built the house for his forthcoming BBC show, James May Toy Stories 'Knocking it down is just wrong on every level. really lovely thing – it would break the hearts of the 1,000 people who worked like dogs to build it.’ May believes that an art gallery, a children’s home or a wealthy private collector might be interested in the house. entrepreneurs hoping to make money from it would face legal problems as Legoland has an exclusive licence to use the plastic bricks as a public Lego has also banned May from dismantling the structure and giving away the bricks, which the company donated for his forthcoming BBC show James May’s Toy Stories. ‘It would dilute Lego’s sales – we can only give them to charity,’ May said. May slept in the house on Friday night, on ‘the most uncomfortable bed I’ve ever slept in’ – when
he also discovered the house was not waterproof. Martin Williams, marketing director of Legoland Windsor, said: ‘We’re disappointed we were not consulted as our model-makers could have advised on building a movable structure. ‘In our opinion, the only way to move the Lego house now is to cut into it, which would compromise the structural integrity and present us with Plastic fantastic: James in the multi-coloured hallway Building blocks: James even used Lego to make kitchen utensils, including a toaster, whisk, bread bin and iron Daily Block: The home, which is unwanted by Legoland, also includes reading material 'We considered all the options but due to timings, logistics and planning permission, we have decided it would not be viable to move the structure to the park.’Earlier this year the TV presenter made his debut in the Chelsea Flower show with a garden made entirely out of plasticine. in Plasticine boasted palm trees, bushes, a vegetable patch, grapevine,
lawn, rockery and pond and featured two and a half tonnes of plasticine in 24 different colours.The 46-year-old claimed his effort is the biggest and most complex plasticine model ever made. He produced the the garden as part of his BBC 2 series James May's Toy Stories, where he aimed to 'get kids out of their bedrooms and away from their Playstations'. Bright idea: James stares through a multi-coloured window as light pours in the homeIf you want to explore coding with Lego bricks, there’s one major option: to use a kit from the company’s well-known Mindstorms robotics line. Mindstorms-based machines are built around the Intelligent Brick, which can be programmed using Lego’s graphical programming environment or one of a number of third-party alternative languages. But Lego also makes a collection of motors, connectors, lights, and infrared receivers collectively sold under the label of Power Functions. In place of a programmable brick, the Power Function line includes a handheld controller for transmitting command signals.
I wondered if it was possible to use a Raspberry Pi to replace the handheld controller, taking on the role of an Intelligent Brick. This would have some advantages. With programs being created on the same device used to control Lego constructions, it would eliminate the need to download the programs to the brick, speeding up development. The US $40 Pi is also a lot cheaper than the $190 Intelligent Brick. I also wondered if such a setup could be used with MIT’s Scratch, a free visual programming environment aimed at children. Scratch extensions are available for use with the Mindstorms brick, but they require altering the brick’s firmware, and I wanted to try something simpler. As I discovered, most of the code required for controlling Lego toys using Scratch is already available as open source software. What was needed was integration, configuration, and some glue software. First, I needed to build an infrared control link, which is basically two infrared LEDs operated via the Raspberry Pi’s general purpose input/output (GPIO) connector and Lego’s receiver.
I used schematics and instructions by Alex Bain to build the hardware. For the software, I downloaded and installed LIRC, a package that has support for decoding and transmitting signals used by over 2,500 different infrared remote controls. Getting the LIRC package to work with my home-brew infrared link was a simple matter of editing some configuration files and specifying which GPIO pins I had wired up for input and output. Now I needed to get LIRC to send valid Lego command signals. This means specifying the waveform—a pattern of infrared pulses—that must be sent for each Lego command. Fortunately, Lego has released a document [PDF] specifying the protocol and format of all commands (for example, a binary value of 1 is transmitted by six pulses of IR light at a frequency of 38 kilohertz, followed by a pause of 553 microseconds). The Lego Power Functions system supports up to four receivers working on different channels, and each receiver has a red side and a blue side, each of which can independently control a motor.
Building on this information, Conor Cary created lego-lirc, a Java program that generates command waveforms, complete with the correct checksums, in a format that LIRC understands. I downloaded lego-lirc and, with the Lego documentation in hand, created additional waveforms that allow the transmission of PWM (pulse-width modulation) commands. These commands allow precise speed adjustment of Power Function motors without requiring timing loops in the application software. (To avoid the hassle of running lego-lirc, you can just download my file of generated LIRC waveforms directly from my GitHub repository under the username of dspinellis.) To configure LIRC to use the Lego commands, I copied the waveform to the LIRC configuration directory. I could then send Lego commands from the Pi’s command line through LIRC’s irsend program. The final step was to issue the LIRC commands from the Scratch environment. I enabled “remote sensor connections” in Scratch. This makes Scratch behave like a local server running on the TCP port 42001.
Client software can connect to Scratch using this port and listen for messages from Scratch programs. (It’s also possible to have the client software and Scratch environment run on separate machines, so you could have the Raspberry Pi–based infrared interface controlled by a Scratch program running on a desktop computer, for example.) I then installed Phillip Quiza’s excellent scratchpy library, which allows you to write Scratch clients in the Python programming language. Finally, I wrote a Python script that receives Scratch broadcast messages specifying Lego remote commands, and runs the LIRC command-line client to send them (this is also available from my lego-power-scratch GitHub repository). To run the script, run the control.py program in a separate terminal window and launch the Scratch environment. While control.py is running, it will display on its standard output the remote control messages it sends or the errors it detects on the incoming Scratch messages. In Scratch, programs are constructed by chaining together graphical blocks on screen.
Blocks perform functions such as program-flow control and graphics manipulation. To send a message to a Lego Power Functions receiver, a “broadcast” block is used, with a simple text string of the form “Lego .” So, for example, the message “Lego 2 blue -7” will send a signal by way of the Python client and my transmitter to turn the motor connected to the blue side of the receiver on channel 2 at full speed, backward. How does the system work in practice with its intended audience? I tried it out with a young budding engineer—who quickly wrote a Scratch program to control Lego’s Volvo Wheel Loader kit with a computer’s arrow keys. This article appears in the November 2016 print issue as “A DIY Lego Controller.” Diomidis Spinellis is a professor of management science and technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, in Greece. He is also editor in chief of the magazine IEEE Software and author of Effective Debugging: 66 Specific Ways to Debug Software and Systems (Addison-Wesley, 2016).