Rebel Droids.net

Well, since the bottom greebles are Lego, I should make a Lego one, right?  Here're pix of the bottom greebles:





The bottom picture has them done. Balls in the corner are just set there, but that's another story.

Kresty has promised that he will do something amazing for the antenna. He bought a bunch of random black bricks. But while I wait he 3D printed black antenna. The 3mm thickness dimension is about right for a lego plate of 3.2mm, so for now I will just use that.




Other ideas were to laser cut Lego plates in the "right" shape. This is going to be tricky.

Since MCK-Y has a play on the name for my mouse droid, I was brainstorming ideas for this sentry droid. H-015 is a letter and 3 numbers, so I was toying with the idea of L-360. It is still a l33t like Lego work and also incorporates the idea of the omniwheels spinning in circles. But it is a little bit close to L-3G0. Too close?

Lara finally got some more time to work on the sentry.  The panels have been done for a while, but we hadn't assembled them due to challenges.


So above is the starting of assembling the head.  But for this one, is Lego really supposed to need a clamp?


Eventually it got pretty.  Sides are glued, but she is not going to kragle the top for now.  We'll see how it does.


And sticking the antennae on it just to see how it looks:


We'll attack the bottom of the head today, hopefully that'll go pretty quick.

The bottom of the head is done now. Shawn set the printed antenna on top.

Well, we've gotten a bit stuck. As previously discussed, the bottom "skirt" doesn't fit all the way around the Lego greebles. We "know" the greebles are the right size because Lego's pretty much a built-in ruler and we have decent photos. The greebles do stick out a little where I know Oliver chopped them off, but it's more than that.

On the plus side, we cut out 2 sides in cardboard, and they "look OK", so the proportions seem good. So we're leaning toward scaling them up.

The head looks really good to us. the lower part might be a hair tall, but it's close (that isn't necessarily related to any drawings we worked from as the Lego isn't an exact fit for the plans.)

But the upper body part again seems off. By coincidence, the Lego fit the drawings really well for those panels, but with the oblique view, you can see that the bottom of the skirt is a bit wider than the wide part of the head. Our panels would be only barely wider.

Which might not be a bad thing. If we just scale up the skirt part, then the interface to the upper body is going to be wider, so stretching that out to reach the scaled skirt might work.

So, for example, this one I measure about 113% of the width on the outermost corners of the top of the body (waist?) compare to the wide part of the head.  Similar views are 12-13% wider as well.


However, Lara's current "waist" is about 4% bigger than the middle of the head.

And, poking around at this more....
* I wish I'd taken better photos at the talk, I'd've picked better angles and perspectives. (like perpendicular to each panel if possible)
* Really impressed with what Savage must've done to get the plans behaving at all, wow! The perspectives can really screw up the angles and stuff, especially on the closer photos.

Well, we'd gotten a bit stuck on the H-015 Sentry.  As mentioned, the Lego Greeblies didn't fit in SC's plans.  We procrasticnated for a while, but I finally got around to cleaning them up and have a model I'm happy with.



I even got carried away and modeled the power switch.


The key point (of course) was to make sure that the Lego fits, and it looks about perfect now!  (Cut away view here).  It's just barely sticking into the wall in this model, so it'll fit great!


I also made a few observations, like the "black" waist belt goes straight down to the platform that the switch button is on.  What I didn't realize is that the "backs" of the left/right black panel cutouts is at the same depth as that panel. (I made it grayer here to be more visible)



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Here's my poor man's version of sticking my updated model on top of a photo I took of some dude driving the droid around on stage.  I don't have the fancy lens stuff to get it all to fit perfect, but it's pretty close.  (Hmm, that makes it look like I put the antenna in the wrong positions).

Anyhoo, Lara & I think this'll be good enough to work with for the rest of the droid.



Trying to get the picture lined up I noticed problems.  Presumably Savage's software is better than mine (different lenses or whatever), but I guess many of my photos are a bit "flatter" than one might expect.  This one works I think primarily because it isn't zoomed in, but the ones that I zoomed in on it's really hard to get two different side panels aligned with both at good angles.  If SketchUp did different projections that might help, but it doesn't.


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