Category: Design

Drawing LEGO Bricks in LaTeX

Sometimes the star align and bring together several of your passions. I love LEGO and I love LaTeX. Thanks to Sam Carter and his TikZbricks package, you can now draw LEGO bricks directly in LaTeX. Let’s start with a simple example of drawing a single 2×4 brick:

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{tikzbricks}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
   \brick{4}{2}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

This will be rendered as:

TikZbricksLEGOLaTeX01

It is possible to build whole models with this package. The LEGO company created its first augmented reality puzzle game that used a mobile app in 2011. It was called Life Of George. This seems like a perfect example for putting TikZbricks to the test.

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{tikzbricks}
\definecolor{lego-white}{rgb}{0.95, 0.95, 0.96}
\begin{document}

\begin{wall}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{2}{1}
    \addtocounter{brickx}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{2}{1}
    \newrow
    \wallbrick[color=blue]{1}{1}
    \addtocounter{brickx}{2}
    \wallbrick[color=blue]{1}{1}
    \newrow
    \wallbrick[color=blue]{4}{1}
    \newrow
    \addtocounter{brickx}{-1}
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{4}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{1}{1}
    \newrow
    \addtocounter{brickx}{-1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{2}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{1}{1}
    \newrow
    \addtocounter{brickx}{-1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{3}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=red]{2}{1}
    \newrow
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{4}{1}
    \newrow
    \addtocounter{brickx}{-1}
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{2}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=black]{1}{1}
    \newrow
    \addtocounter{brickx}{-1}
    \wallbrick[color=yellow]{1}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=lego-white]{2}{1}
    \wallbrick[color=yellow]{3}{1}
    \newrow
    \wallbrick[color=yellow]{4}{1}
\end{wall}

\end{document}

This will be rendered as:

TikZbricksLEGOLaTeX02

There are many more options, such as chaning the perspective and size of various components. But we will leave this for now and simply enjoy this moment.

Adjustable nose bridge for swimming goggles

Pierre Magadur from the French Polytech Angers Engineering School worked on an internship project at the University of Canterbury. His goal was to find a better solution for adjusting the nose bridge for swimming goggles. Somehow they never seem to fit perfectly. Some manufacturers supply 3-4 sizes while others use a simple string. Still, adjusting them to individual needs remains difficult.

Pierre designed a solution that can be fitted to any goggles. The prototype is a proof of concept and focuses on the mechanical solution.  Here is a little video on how the design works:

Continue reading “Adjustable nose bridge for swimming goggles”

Mechanical Keyboards Guide

A short list of the best mechanical keyboards.

Once you typed on a mechanical keyboard, you never want to go back to the stock rubber dome keyboards that come with most computers. And I am not even a gamer. I just spend a lot of time in front of computers. Even Logitech has entered the mechanical keyboard market aside from gaming with their MX Mechanical. It has become its own hobby, with enthusiast spending many hours on selecting, assembling, modifying keyboards. It is another rabbit hole. “How deep?” you ask? Just check out these YouTube Channels.

Instead of spending my own thousands of dollars, I decided I should rather eatable you to do it for me. So here we go, a list of my favourite keyboards. I have settled on the 75% form factor as the most suitable for me.

Matias Mini Tactile Pro

This Matias Mini keyboard is heavily inspired by the good old Mac keyboards and it is one of the fews that have Alps switches. Continue reading “Mechanical Keyboards Guide”

New HRI Podcast: Emotions and Consciousness in Robots

Extended Interview With Douglas Campbell

I am happy to announce a new episode of the Human-Robot Interaction Podcast:

Emotions And Consciousness In Robots

In the last HRI podcast episode we talked about the role of emotions for humans and robots. The interview with Douglas Campbell truly inspired me and there was not enough time in the last episode to go into the full depth of our conversation. So here it is, our full discussion about emotions and consciousness in robots.

Yellow-eyed penguin made with LEGO

Converting a 3D STL file to a LEGO model.

It has been some time since I designed this large scale model of a Yellow-Eyed Penguin for the Pop-Up Penguin exhibition. The model is 168cm tall and consist of approximately 60,000 LEGO bricks.

The organiser of the exhibition sent me the STL file of their fibre-glass penguin. I then used the brickplicator software to convert the 3D STL model into a LEGO 3D model that can be build. Since this was a very large model, Gerrit helped me a bit with the conversion. I then imported the model into Stud.io and rendered the model.

This does seem like a good workflow to convert existing 3D models of animals or any organic form, to LEGO models.