Man Builds 7-foot Grandfather Clock from Lego

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

server made of lego too?

[deft]

its just got smashed!

Re:server made of lego too?

[skids]

It's not down, it's just very slow. With 4cm logic, you probably only get about 0.002 hertz CPU speed.

Hrm... 386 has about 275,000 transistors and looking at the
gates [ikaruga.co.uk]
I'd estimate that works out to about 10 legos a transistor.... That's one expensive server!

Re:server made of lego too?

[zeath]

That is by far the best use of legos I've ever seen. I wish I had enough gears in the bins I have tucked away to do something elaboratively creative with that. Though I bet once you get too many in sequence the gears would require more torque than the lego housings can resist.

Re:server made of lego too?

[zeath]

I guess I don't understand the lego thing. Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and had lots of scrap to build stuff out of. Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I could fabricate a perfectly useful table fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs without as much as a strain. :)

I would definently agree with you; playing with heat and metal is far more practical than plastic blocks, but making stuff with legos offers both a handicap and limitation that challenges the builders to be creative. With stuff like this it's not so much "look what I can do" but rather "look what I can do with all these limitations and obstacles". To reverse the roles, welding together a bunch of metal interlocking blocks and making a small castle out of them would be equally cool, even though the legos would have been an easier solution and ultimately achieved the same design.

Re:server made of lego too?

[Short Circuit]

LEGOs would give me an advantage. My craftsmanship isn't all that great, meaning it's "measure twice, cut three times," for me.

Having uniform building blocks really helps.

Re:server made of lego too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't it keep fairly accurate time? The physics of a pendulum are fairly well understood and gravity is reasonably constant. The plastic is much less subject to environmental effects than the wood and metal that clocks of this style were traditionally made of and LEGO's tolerances are a lot higher than was possible for many of those clocks.

Part of the appeal of lego technic in particular is the large toolkit of compatible parts. I build a lot of gadgets and trying to mate the motor from a CD player with the gearbox off a toy truck is not as easy as it sounds. I'm no purist...if I am trying to accomplish a task, I will use whatever works. The nice thing about lego is that it is convenient and does work for many "human-scale" tasks. Also you can build with it in your living room which is especially nice for those of us without a workshop or garage.

Finally, I'll bet it keeps better time than a clock built with an arc welder

Re:server made of lego too?

[AndyL]

The "Lego Thing" is that you have a limited set of basic, standardized componants. Everyone's legos are the same but they can be used to make a nearly infinite set of creations. And with a little knowledge of good engineering practices you can create suprisingly solid constructions.

It combines the thrill of making something out of the smallest possible componants that you get from writing a program in assembly with the child-like simplicity of the building material. You have a system of construction tha

MIT Robotic Competition?

[TFGeditor]

"The 'Lego Thing' is that you have a limited set of basic, standardized componants. Everyone's legos are the same but they can be used to make a nearly infinite set of creations. And with a little knowledge of good engineering practices you can create suprisingly solid constructions."

This concept reminds one of the MIT robotic competition http://web.mit.edu/6.270/www/contestants/ [mit.edu] et al. Design teams work with identical parts kits http://web.mit.edu/6.270/www/contestants/handouts/ kit2004.html [mit.edu] which, in

Re:server made of lego too?

[Culture]

I guess I don't understand the lego thing. Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and had lots of scrap to build stuff out of. Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I could fabricate a perfectly useful table fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs without as much as a strain. :) When I grew up, I had to build my clocks out of mud scraped off my body, moss and sticks, and we liked it.

Re:server made of lego too?

[cide1]

Just finishing up my end of semester projects, had to analyze several CPUs I designed this semester. One very simple one used 1048 logic cells, but could do integer arithmetic, jumps, branches, and memory operations. Not quite sure how many transistors that translates too, but normally an FPGA cell is a binary operation. Removing several of the odd arithmetic operations would lower that size quite a bit more. I also designed a 5 stage pipelined CPU with 32 word instruction cache, and 32 word data cache in about 2300 logic cells.

When the first vacuum tube based computers were invented, I'll built the designers felt like they were implementing a CPU of this size in Legos. It seems funny now, but this analogy probably holds a lot of water.

Ahh, back in the days...

[skids]

When "computer architecture" consisted of asking the question "how big a room do we need to hold it?"

Re:Ahh, back in the days...

[Rhys]

For those of us who work with supercomputers, it still means that. And "how much more power do we need" and "how much cooling do we need" and "there are how-many-thousnad-ethernet-cables?"

Only on slashdot!

[adolfojp]

Shouldn't the parent have been modded funny?

Cheers,
Adolfo

Re:server made of lego too?

[R.Caley]

It's not down, it's just very slow.

It's not the CPU which is the problem, it's constructing TCP/IP packets out of Lego and squeezing them through the ethernet cable.

They get stuck at every kink in the cable, and someone has to go and clear the blockage by hand.

Mind you, packet fragmentation is far easier than with the traditional hand-whittled wooden packets.

Re:server made of lego too?

[Vampyre_Macavity]

That's true - but you also have to take into account that it's far easier to reassemble a fractured Lego packet than it is to reassemble a fractured traditional packet.

I think I'm going to switch over to the Lego L-3500 computer system - my Traditional OAK-950 just can't hack it anymore.

Re:server made of lego too?

[R.Caley]

The rings don't get stuck going through the wire like square lego packets.

Of course, you have to worry about a hacker getting hold of the One Ring and rerouting all your communications.

Re:server made of lego too?

[aldousd666]

takes one to know one

Re:server made of lego too?

[AndyL]

According to the company, Lego is not a noun and therefore has no plural. The correct phrase (according to them) is "Lego Brick".

It's fine.... coral cache...

[B747SP]

I just sucked all the relevant pages through the coral cache, so it should be fine that way. Here's a link [nyud.net].

Re:server made of lego too?

[swiftstream]

Actually, in the comp sci building at stanford they have the original server that Google ran on, and the case was built out of lego.

IIRC, though, they used the large bricks intended for younger children.

Re:server made of lego too?

[Leffe]

I wish you could weight reset servers :(

Re:server made of lego too?

[zarkzervo]

My server is made of Lego.

Mini-ITX, a 20GB drive and no other devices. The box is build around the components. No extra space wasted :)

It's quite expandable. (Except that in Norway Lego is more expensive than to hire a metal worker from Poland full time in case you need him to build you a bigger pc-case)

Espen Arnesen

Awesomely cool!

[BlackMagi]

Seems to be /.'ed before the first post even (which I'm sure I'm about to be pipped to).

I remember those awesome lego days of my childhood with huge displays in the big dept stores.... no longer. Seems to be pre-moulded crap these days. Good on him.

Boy he'll be pissed...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when his (grand)kid shows up and takes the thing apart to play with it.

Re:Boy he'll be pissed...

[pyrote]

somehow doubt he'll get to the point of children... anyone who has this much time is unlikely to get laid.

I doubt anyone who has "House of yes" posters as decoration is activly getting any.

wow!

[ssand]

what's next for him? A seven foot tall girlfriend made entirely of lego?

Re:wow!

[blk96gt]

He's going to be sore after the first night of sex from sticking his "lego" in her.

Re:wow!

[Besjon]

No no, a seven foot tall girlfriend made entirely of lego would be mortally dangerous as it could lead to a crushed pelvis and death by snu-snu.

Re:wow!

[NardofDoom]

"The spirit is willing but the flesh is spongey and bruised."

Re:wow!

[Smylers]

what's next for him? A seven foot tall girlfriend made entirely of lego?

Not quite, but he has built a girl out of lego [nyud.net].

Smylers

Re:wow!

[Muhammar]

no. A fully functional grandfather, yes. (rocking chair is push-reset every 13 hour)

Re: What's next for him?

[Kardamon]

What about an analytical engine [wikipedia.org] made of Lego?

Re: What's next for him?

[GregWebb]

Well, there's already Meccano (Erector) Difference Engines out there... http://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_1/ and http://www.steamengine.com.au/misc/models/babbage /

I'm sure I've heard about analytical engines in the planning stages but don't think there's anything out there yet.

To be honest, clocks are relatively common in Meccano - you can buy a plan to build a grandfather clock from a no. 10 set, I believe. The one I thought of in particular, though, was made about 20 years ago by Noel Ta'Bo

Re: What's next for him?

[Kardamon]

Wow, this is cool!

Kit

[leapis]

I'd love to know when the kit for this goes on sale. Of all the large-scale Lego designs I've seen, just once I'd like someone to start selling a kit or at least instructions to built it yourself.

just so you know....

[Lxy]

This is the same Eric who built some guy's desk out of LEGO a few years back. He's been talked about on /. before, just check out his portfolio:

http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/portfolio.html [ericharshbarger.org]

He's built clocks before, but I think this is his first working model. Of course, be sure to check out his Tux and BSD Daemon sculptures as well. This guy is a master at LEGO construction, and be sure to look for him in the future.

Re:just so you know....

[Binestar]

When the boss sees it, he'll help you build a Lego Pinkslip. (Do they come in pink?)

I know you were trying to be funny, but the Lego desk was actually promised in the guy's Employment contract. It was the "boss" who purchased the desk.

Re:just so you know....

[eam]

> > This is the same Eric who built some guy's desk
> > out of LEGO a few years back.
>
> When the boss sees it, he'll help you build a Lego
> Pinkslip. (Do they come in pink?)

This was in 1999 during the dot-com boom. If I recall correctly, some guy included it among his list of demands for a position, and the company hiring him paid to have it made for him.

So, in other words, I'm sure the company has already gone bankrupt.

Google cache

[virtig01]

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Cs8oaitTLG0J: www.ericharshbarger.org/cgi-bin/photo.cgi%3Fclock_ 5.jpg%2Blego/images/clock+&hl=en [64.233.161.104]

Re:Google cache

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people insist on using the google cache when the pictures tell most of the story. It's still pulling the pictures from the original souce.
Now this coralized link [nyud.net] on the other hand is pulling from the coral servers and since the pictures are relative (rather than absolute), coral works quite well.

Re:Google cache

[delta_avi_delta]

Google cache the pictures as well, that's what the fuss was about a few weeks ago - they cached a site that had pirated pics, hence they served pirated pics

Re:Google cache

[BetterThanCaesar]

Eh, wrong. They save a thumbnail for the image search. They don't save images for the Google cache of an entire page.

slashdotted already...

[Atrax]

.. or so it seems. that poor little server!

before it started to fail though, I noticed the escapement [ericharshbarger.org] violates the retentive geek's rules on colour matching in lego construction. Just because it's hidden doesn't mean you can just bodge it together out of mismatched pieces, you know.

Re:slashdotted already...

[meatflower]

When you design an escapement gear made only out of lego's that actually works than YOU can bitch about the colors matching.

Re:slashdotted already...

[fredopalus]

Yeah, that seems like a fair complaint.
Especially when you consider he built a WHOLE GRANDFATHER CLOCK out of legos.

Re:slashdotted already...

[Reignking]

Color matching? The only colors that the clock matches are McDonald's...

No Electricity....

[Gopal.V]

Doesn't guy wrote this know that at the time when a these 6 foot wonders were invented, there WAS NO ELECTRICITY !!. It runs on pure potential energy stored in weights.

The interesting part is that it would be much harder to make a real grandfather clock (like the one at my ancestral home) - because Lego in comparison is easier to build.

But Kudos to the guy - it's not really pointless , it would have helped if this was part of at least a few mechanical engineer's curriculum - not just carnot cycle engines.

Re:No Electricity....

[Dephex Twin]

Doesn't guy wrote this know that at the time when a these 6 foot wonders were invented, there WAS NO ELECTRICITY !!. It runs on pure potential energy stored in weights.

I think it is safe to say he does, since he built a working grandfather clock, and probably didn't re-invent the mechanical design himself from scratch.

The interesting part is that it would be much harder to make a real grandfather clock (like the one at my ancestral home) - because Lego in comparison is easier to build.

For building the housing, this might be, but if you are limiting yourself to pure lego parts, there is a good deal of creativity involved in order to make a full-sized, functioning clock that is accurate without cheating.

Re:No Electricity....

[elmegil]

I think he meant the guy who wrote the slashdot submission, not the guy who built the clock.

MIrrors

[kerbe6]

Main [mirrordot.org]
Gears [mirrordot.org]
Numbers [mirrordot.org]
Face [mirrordot.org]
Mechanics [mirrordot.org]

And yet more mirrors

[davidwr]

From my hall of mirrors [slashdot.org]:

Corel Cache [nyud.net]

Internet Archive [archive.org]

Google cache [64.233.161.104] Note - images may not be cached.

Re:MIrrors

[AndroidCat]

Looks like we broke the mirrors too. 35 years bad luck. There'll be no escapement for the princess this time.

Grinding

[borgasm]

I can almost hear the gears grinding to a halt as a million clients topple his server.

I wonder what the melting point of legos is...

I have to say...

[meme_police]

...I'm not usually impressed by Lego stories but that is pretty fuckin' cool.

Mirror .

[vectorian798]

Click here for the good stuff [mirrordot.com]

why nobody uses mirrordot.

[Vo0k]

'cause it only mirrors the first page. If that's a text story, it hardly ever needs mirroring. If that's a photo gallery, only thumbnails are mirrored, the real photos remain slashdotted even faster than normally.

Damn Near Atomic!

[Mulletproof]

"It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours."

Accurate, you say? Every 13 hours? If only every clock were that accurate...

Re:Damn Near Atomic!

[Lisandro]

It's probably accurate enough; what needs to be reset is the pendulum, from which the kinetic energy is converted into movement in the gears. I don't recall the math, but as long as the weight is moving the time it takes to swing from side to side is constant (no matter how high or fast) - which is how those clocks keep track of time.

13 hs is not too shabby for a weight made of plastic LEGO pieces...

Anyway, kudos to that guy. He has a lot of spare time :) but what he did is incredibly cool.

Re:Damn Near Atomic!

[Zarquon]

Not true. The swing of a pendulum does not form a true cycloid (and thus the period is not independent of amplitude). It does, however, approximate it very closely for short arcs.

Huygens played with using "cheeks" to modify a string pendulum into something closer to cycloid.. it turned out to be easier to use an escapement (the anchor escapement, for example) that works with smaller pendulum arcs.

For a while there I thought I was the only one...

[tonyz2k]

who had a House of Yes [imdb.com] movie poster over my fireplace. Phew. (only on Slashdot..)

Re:For a while there I thought I was the only one.

[the_quark]

So, in the poster in the picture of the clock, she's holding a gun. On IMDB, she's holding a gun. But on IMDB's poster link [imdb.com], her hands are open. What's up with that?

Re:For a while there I thought I was the only one.

[Pseudonym]

I hear that in the digitally remastered version, she's holding a walkie-talkie.

Incidentally, was I the only person who expected a poster for something called The House of Yes to be painted by Roger Dean?

All I can say

[RealProgrammer]

is it's about time someone did this.

We should give this guy a big hand. And then a second hand. But then, he's probably got his hands all in place already.

Can this run Linux? It would be a great NTP server.

Re:All I can say

[liquidsin]

If he were a *real* nerd he'd have a web cam pointing at it with recognition software to read the time off the face and sync his ntp server off of it. I know that's what I'd do if I could figure out how the FUCK to build a goddamn working clock out of lego. Maybe I'll start on that after my Mindstorm beer bottle opener is finished...

Re:All I can say

[RealProgrammer]

Yeah, I'm not much of a hardware geek, either.

People who can build working stuff out of lego may as well be practicing witchcraft, as far as I can tell.

This is truly...

[accelleron]

This is truly a victory for the geek-child within all of us

Lego Master Builder?

[jmcmunn]

Does anyone know if this guy was one of the people who tried to get the Lego Master Builder job awhile back? If not, then he probably missed out on a good chance. I looked at a bunch of the stuff they made during the "interview" for the master builder job, and they were quite amazing. So perhaps Eric wouldn't have blown away the competition, but he at least stands a shot.

I, however, will stick to building little houses and cars just like the directions indicate. :-)

Re:Lego Master Builder?

[mks113]

I don't think he tried out for the "master builder" He has done some contract work for Lego, and I think he is quite happy to be freelance. I think he actually gets more exposure on his own than he would as a Lego employee.

The clock is a few years old. Erik "used to be" a programmer, but now considers himself a full-time lego builder. He is also a champion scrabble player.

Overall, a geek of geeks, right at home on slashdot. Once the server his server has cooled down, make sure you take a look over hi

Another one?

[mark-t]

I can't check his site at the moment... it seems to be suffering from too many simultaneous visits.

Anyways, I remember seeing stories about this guy before... and his grandfather clock was finished way back then. Has he built another one? Or is this just a dupe of a story from waaaaaaay back?

Re:Another one?

[Mycroft_VIII]

That one had a few 'real' parts in it IIRC, whereas this apears to be pure leggo bricks.
Not 100% shure though.

Mycroft

Heh...

[DarkMantle]

And I thought I had no life

Laugh, it's funny

Stargate

[Nermal6693]

I think a stargate made from Lego [commanderkitty.com] is much more impressive.

This is NOT news

[unicorn]

According to the bloody dictionary, news is "1 a : a report of recent events"

Eric's desk has been featured on Slashdot, 4 +YEARS ago. He built it in Aug of 2000. The Slashdot story was posted Aug 27, of the same year. He's made the front page of Slashdot 3 more times since.

He built the clock in January. 8 months before the desk, and the story.

This emphatically does NOT qualify as news anymore. No way, no how.

What is it the editors do here again? Anything useful?

Re:This is NOT news

[Khuffie]

Heh. Check it [ericharshbarger.org]. It was originally done in January 2000 and the weight reset time has been updated last year to be 30 hours.

Re:This is NOT news

[FauxReal]

It appears the Slashdot editors went to the US Patent office school of research.

Re:This is NOT news

[grozzie2]

they have a school ??? I thought they just grabbed all the dropouts from real schools...

Re:This is NOT news

[YaRness]

What is it the editors do here again? Anything useful?

your boss caught you surfing on slashdot and is wondering the same thing about you.

Re:This is NOT news

[qbwiz]

Would you rather they not submit something interesting, since they didn't find out about it until a week later, or would you rather pay a ton of money for them to hire tons of people to search the web for interesting things, and still find things too late for them to be news?

Re:This is NOT news

[sootman]

Someone with a UID as low as yours should know this was answered FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO right here: http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml [slashdot.org]

"Personally, I have a pet peeve when people post comments saying things like "That's not News For Nerds!" and "That's not Stuff that Matters!" Slashdot has been running for almost 5 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker on what ends up on the homepage. It turns out that a lot of people agree with me: Linux, Legos [emphasis added], Pengu

Perhaps you should read my f'ing comment

[unicorn]

I never said in any way, or even implied in any way that Lego wasn't news, or interesting.

My comment was ENTIRELY to the fact that it wasn't news ANYMORE. And hadn't been for almost 5 years.

It's the next best thing to a re-post. It's a posting about someone that has been on /. repeatedly for far more recent items. And if anyone cared to look at the more recent stuff, they would have seen this item, which predates Eric appearing on /. for the first time.

I misread the article title.

[Phidoux]

Man Builds 7 foot Grandfather Cock from Lego. I was just about to rush out and by myself a huge Lego set.

The Lego Clock song

[Quinn_Inuit]

The Lego Grandfather Clock was too tall for the shelf
So it stood for five years on the floor
More complicated by half than my lego castles
And weighed a whole lot more
It was built on the verge of a major Lego urge
And was a major source of his pride
Till its server stopped, short
Never to go again
When 'twas Slashdotted till it died

To answer the obvious question...

[rdwald]

...yes, he's made a girl [ericharshbarger.org] out of Legos. Only a mosaic, unfortunately.

100% Lego????

[Macfox]

What's the white part pictured?

http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/images/clock/g earworks_top.jpg [ericharshbarger.org]

I'm no Lego head, but I haven't seen that part one before. Is it Lego? Look's like a pully?

Rob

Re:100% Lego????

[Tomfrh]

It's a technic wheel with the tyre removed.

Portfolio

[Anonymous Custard]

This guy sure has an impressive portfolio [nyud.net].

The next generation can run for 30 hours, not 13

[brianmf]

He recently "discovered" a new type of lego brick [nyud.net] which allowed a vast improvement in the mechanism [nyud.net]. The update is dated 12 March 2003, the original dating from 20 January 2000.

OLD NEWS

[mavantix]

Either I live in a time warp, or this same exact story was one /. like 6+ months ago?

Can't you all at least approve stories that have NEW news in them?

Did anyone read that title as...

[tekrat]

Man Builds 7-Foot Tall Grandfather From Lego ?

Now *that* would be impressive!

Re:Did anyone read that title as...

[Bud]

Man Builds 7-Foot Tall Grandfather From Lego ?

Now *that* would be impressive!

Yes, and then he could kill (or at least dismantle) his own grandfather without even going back in time, and get double paradox bonus points.

Actually, it just goes to show that time may be circular, but LEGO bricks are mostly square, with knobs on.

--Bud

Grandfather?

[krumms]

In Korea, old people are clocks.

Oh, oh, and in Soviet Russia, grandfather clocks you.

Re:how sad...

[Omniscientist]

I guess we are too strong for the average lego-builder's server to handle.

In essence, we own the lego.

Re:Same axis

[Vo0k]

pretty rare part [archive.org]

Re:Same axis

[mark-t]

Leo's LEGO has the answer to this particular question [science.uva.nl].

Re:of course it got smashed...

[grozzie2]

That would require intelligence on the part of the poster, a concept mutually exclusive with /.

Re:How Accurate Is It?

[ajs318]

The gear ratios just determine that the hour hand makes one revolution for every twelve revolutions of the minute hand. Since one gear tooth pushes another gear on by exactly one tooth, it's a fairly trivial matter to choose appropriate numbers of teeth so this will be the case. What really determines the accuracy of the clock is the pendulum and the escapement. A pendulum always takes the same amount of time to complete a cycle {centre - edge - centre - other edge - back to centre} {Or at least, as lo

nomenclature

[sczimme]

"And hillbillies want to be called sons of the soil but it ain't gonna happen."

/Dr. Hibbert

Re:LEGO(R) Bricks

[Mordaximus]

I suppose you say GNU/Linux, even in idle converstaion? And you never omit Microsoft when referring to Windows?

I have never heard anyone refer to LEGO bricks as such, until now. Nor have I failed to understand what was being referred to when someone says Lego. Maybe LEGO needs to get over itself.

Re:LEGO(R) Bricks

[tonsofpcs]

when referring to Windows?
Why would I want to do a silly thing like that?

Re:LEGO(R) Bricks

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Where is +1 Anal Retentive when you need it? :)