PleegWat plays with lego
-
So, I promised a couple of pics once I got this thing together. It's not quite there yet - I need some extra extension leads because things don't reach - but I made several shots.
The whole thing. Pretty stock from this angle. That's a 1.5L bottle of cola for scale.
Rear shot. In the bottom, you can see the tail end of the gearing driving the left track - it's mirrored on the right. Above that is the mechanism that moves the output belt side to side. Stock, this has a toggle switch to either keep the belt with the lower assembly, or keep it with the upper assembly, or control it manually. My motorised setup always keeps it with the lower assembly, and adds a separate motor via a differential to swing it side to side.
The undercarriage, from behind. On the near side, you can see the full gearing driving the left track, and right of that the battery box powering the lower assembly. Beyond that is the sbrick controlling the motors in this part of the device, and behind that sit three motors. Two of these drive the tracks, the middle one is led upward through the turntables and drives the output belt. In the far back is the second sbrick which will control the motors in the upper section, but is currently not tucked away because it's not fully wired up yet.
-
fellow Technic fan!That single motor driving all the things was, IMO, the stock model's biggest weakness. Since it's the largest Technic model for now, it really should have had more motors (e.g. the 42030 Volvo had 4 motors and only about 40% the pieces of this monster). And the lack of steering didn't help it either…
Are the sbricks good? I ordered a couple but haven't gotten round to plugging them in yet.
-
@dcoder Yeah, there's a reason I've got the upper belt plus bucket wheel on the XL motor, and the lower belt on a separate L motor, since even those two together can't quite be driven by the XL alone.
The sbrick works quite comfortably, though the motors controlled by it whine a bit more than they do on stock controls (like the infrared, which is pretty annoying to use). It appears to be driving the motors via PWM at 255 steppings per direction. You need to set up control interfaces via their website, but you can only open them up on the smartphone if you've actually got a powered sbrick in bluetooth range.
-
@pleegwat Oh, and one limitation of the stock sbrick app is that it can only tie controls to outputs 1-to-1. There appear to be some scaling features, but if you want to do more complex calculations or scripted controls you'll have to drive it directly. They do publish the protocol.
