From what I've heard, the tolerances on Lego pieces are very tight. Most commercially available 3D printers can't yet reach those tolerances, so the pieces don't fit together very well. Although I guess having a perfect fit might not matter as much for a project like this vs. a 2 foot wide model of the Death Star!
few years ago, I started a site which had "lego" in its name. Even though it was actually promoting Lego and not at all commercial ( no Ads no fees ). I got a cease and desist letter from Lego Group, and they demanded that I hand over the domain to them.
I didn't want the trouble for a site which was not even making money for me, so I just transferred the domain to them.
Love the idea, especially it's accessibility. This feels like it would be fast to manage physically, except for the take-photo-and-email component, which could be replaced by a webcam pointed at the board. Then there's also no technical friction fiddling on your phone.
1) Do you have to give your calendar login to a 3rd party?
2) What happens I add something to my calendar on my computer, is there some alert sent to someone that they need to add a lego to the board?
3) What I schedule something on the calendar online, but the lego doesn't get added to the board. When someone takes a picture and syncs it, what will happen to my appointment? Will it think it's gone and erase it? Notify of the descrepency, etc....
I'm envisioning in my head some arduino powered lego calendar that automatically puts the blocks in place as appointments are added/moved/deleted from the cloud.
Speculation: It appears they are using this for the overarching structure of projects. Rather than managing individual appointments it manages overall time, e.g. on this day BobbySue should be spending 50% of her time on project A and 50% on project B. Then you can make the calendar read only from the digital side.
That being said, I would still like to see a pick-n-place managed version of this that stays in sync with google calendar.
Although the image recognition software is cool, it's almost surely cheaper to just set up Mechanical Turk HITs, compared to however many programmer-hours were spent on the image recognition.
Well, I'm not an expert by an means but I think the plumbing would take far more time than the vision itself - hooking up to a calender api, etc. Maybe MT would run into the same issues. But HITs are super cheap, and a single programmer-day in many countries would still buy a ton of HITs at a few cents a pop.
Can the synchronizer differentiate between single block and double block heights?
Also, another cool level of granularity (if needed) could be using 1x2 or 1x1 lego blocks to add more information that's easily seen in the photo. Not only do you have different colors of 1x2 and 1x1 blocks, you can also place them in different positions (left/right vertically, top/bottom horizontally).
All in all, great idea. I'd like to set one of these up myself in the future.
I've been playing around with this same kind of idea.
In my case I was using a cheap Android phone as a camera. Color recognition of 1x1 size Legos start to become problematic from more than 2 meters away, even in good lighting conditions.
Couldn't it be solved by only taking a picture of the changed columns of the calendar instead of the entire three months?
I'm not familiar with how you're processing the picture, but it might be possible to identify the columns by utilizing the empty row at the top of each column. I count 7 positions/bits. You can use 2 bits to mark the month and the remaining 5 bits to mark the day of the month. Using this encoding, you could even add a fourth month without any problems.
If you remove a blue block of "Blue project" from some day because for some reason you're doing something else, or are sick or whatever, then you need to place it somewhere else on the planning calendar, as the expected amount of work doesn't shrink.
Hiding it in a drawer means that a block of neccesary work has not been scheduled anywhere and will bite you back later (or you'll do it sometime of regular hours).
Readit News
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NgBBDpSJ34/SNm7FhCVdNI/AAAAAAAADX...
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lego+calendar#!/story/forever/0/le...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475285
1) Do you have to give your calendar login to a 3rd party? 2) What happens I add something to my calendar on my computer, is there some alert sent to someone that they need to add a lego to the board? 3) What I schedule something on the calendar online, but the lego doesn't get added to the board. When someone takes a picture and syncs it, what will happen to my appointment? Will it think it's gone and erase it? Notify of the descrepency, etc....
I'm envisioning in my head some arduino powered lego calendar that automatically puts the blocks in place as appointments are added/moved/deleted from the cloud.
That being said, I would still like to see a pick-n-place managed version of this that stays in sync with google calendar.
Also, another cool level of granularity (if needed) could be using 1x2 or 1x1 lego blocks to add more information that's easily seen in the photo. Not only do you have different colors of 1x2 and 1x1 blocks, you can also place them in different positions (left/right vertically, top/bottom horizontally).
All in all, great idea. I'd like to set one of these up myself in the future.
In my case I was using a cheap Android phone as a camera. Color recognition of 1x1 size Legos start to become problematic from more than 2 meters away, even in good lighting conditions.
I'm not familiar with how you're processing the picture, but it might be possible to identify the columns by utilizing the empty row at the top of each column. I count 7 positions/bits. You can use 2 bits to mark the month and the remaining 5 bits to mark the day of the month. Using this encoding, you could even add a fourth month without any problems.
Hiding it in a drawer means that a block of neccesary work has not been scheduled anywhere and will bite you back later (or you'll do it sometime of regular hours).