Lego and a Nerd.

This is massively impressive.. No idea how people can do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY

"Lego felt tip 110" printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not mindstorms, I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a "wiring" board.

FAQ: Track name? "Christopher and Raphael just popper Shinichi Osawa distortion disco edit"

FAQ: How long did this take? Hard to say, maybe 3 weeks working evenings.

FAQ: You're a student and this is a university project? I'm not a student, this is just a hobby project.

FAQ: Just a remake of the 1092a? No, I'd never seen the 1092a until now. However some of the parts came from a 8094 kit amongst others many years ago. It is made to my own design, but I acknolwedge influences and the great work of the official lego designers !

FAQ: Does this use mindstorms? Nope, wiring demo board + homemade analog electronics and sensors.

FAQ: DPI? Dots per inch? Approx 75 DPI

FAQ: PPM? Pages per minute? Not even 1! I sped things up a little in the video editing to keep it interesting to watch

FAQ: Helvetica? Yes of course, my respect to those who noticed

FAQ: Full color version/more colours? Originally I was going to do 3 colour version, but I had to simplify as only have 4 lego motors.

FAQ: Open source, schematics etc? Yes, I'll try to get around to this soon. Unfortunately I'm pretty busy at work at moment and documenting this project to a good standard will take a while. Sorry

FAQ: Wrote your own driver? Yes, uses standard Mac OS print mechanism.

FAQ: Are you using some sort of MCU demo board(the black pcb)? Yes. [1] http://wiring.org.co/hardware/

FAQ: re: Mac vs PC abuse? Video not meant as a Mac advert and I'm sorry if the Apple logo offends anyone. I just find them easier to use.

FAQ: Felt tip damage drying up? Yes this is a problem, but one felt tip usually lasts for quite a few pages.

FAQ: Felt tip auto-capping? Nope, sorry.

FAQ: Sensor info: Horizontal positioning using homemade shaft encoder (black/white rotating lego squares you see in the vid) with a SY-CR102 photo reflector from Maplins, (only £0.89 or $1.30). This is into a sampled analog input as I couldn't get full enough saturation to trigger the ext interrupt pins. There are also push buttons built into lego bricks for left and right end stop detection.

Coriolanus

Yeah, saw it before. Still amazing though.

AckwelFoley

lol. smart guy.

Nearly as good as Macgyver

BrokenArrows

thats pretty cool.

one of our projects in college was to create a lego robot and program it.
Lego developed a java based API for doing this stuff.

I made a robot which was supposed to drive around and collect different coloured lego blocks and sort them. it failed miserably. haha.

Nulty

Its people like that that make everyone else wonder what point there is in competing!?!

E0inz

That pretty sweet...I want one