New LEGO Color Guide Published

I am proud to announce that the fourth edition of the Unofficial LEGO Color Guide is now available. The printed book is available as a paperback and hardcover from Amazon and other resellers. An eBook (PDF) is available from Lulu. The paper printing process has a limited color space and hence I recommend the PDF if you need to have best possible representation. Head over to Minifigure.org for more details on the book.

New Zealand Record for longest LEGO train track

New Zealand LEGO train track record.

Today we set the New Zealand record for the longest LEGO train track at the University of Canterbury’s library with the help of LUG 4/2. We achieve 230.5 meters, including bridges, tunnels and other features.

I took a 360 panoramic video with my Ricoh Theta camera. You can enjoy the 4K spherical video here:

Photos from the event are available over at Flickr.

LEGO Train Automation

How to control four LEGO trains on one track.

The LEGO company offers remote controls to play with your trains. You can control up to four trains with one remote. This works fine as long as each train runs on a dedicated track and you only need to pay attention to one train at a time. LEGO only allows you to control trains. You cannot control track switches, lights or decouplers remotely.

The 4DBrix company is offering advanced train automation and today I would like to share my latest train automation project with you. I ran four trains on one track without any collisions.

This video shows all four trains from the top, including a picture in picture video of one of the trains.

This video is a 360 panoramic video. You can spin the camera and look at all the trains and LEGO sets.

I used 4DBrix’s nControl IDE to program all the trains that were connected to the computer using Bluetooth. nControl uses the Python programming language. One little hick up was the need to flash the firmware of my BLED112 Bluetooth dongle to allow for more than three trains simultaneously.

New artwork for LEGO 18836pb04 shield

A drawing of the 18836pb04 LEGO shield.

The LEGO Classic Castle shield 18836pb04 is part of the collectible Minifigures series. Time to create a new drawing of the artwork. I have to find a way how to incorporate this new shield in my previous poster and t-shirt.

18836pb04-lego-shield