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Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

brickit.app

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Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#82

Very cool. Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of rocks and tell me how to put them together to build a wall with minimal space between them. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/stone-wall-texture-pict... Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

I've been curious to see what a stable diffusion type thing trained on blueprints and schematics could produce.

The magnum opus of such a project would be something that could produce the circuit from the text "a guitar pedal that makes a guitar sound like wet blankets and dry pickles in the washing machine."

The extension of your idea would be a piece of software that could generate the BoM and gcode to assemble the circuit, or in your instance the bricks.

The meta of that would be the circuit that could build circuits that build circuits.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#83
Won't the amount of variations possible in the bricks be very limited? A full size brick, a half brick, a 3/4 brick and sizes in between. Isn't the app then going to give the same set of recommendations for almost every brick pile? In that case is it even a brick scanning app anymore?

Post read edit: Facepalm. This is about Lego bricks!

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#84
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often: Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of socks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect match. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/socks-pile-texture-pict... Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

This works remarkably well in that you might think you'd end up throwing away a lot of good socks, but in my experience socks are surprisingly prone to either design flaws that sees many socks from the same batches wear out in the same way around the same time and/or similar wear from your footwear etc., so when they start going odds are you'll see a series of rapid failures, and you're not losing much by replacing them all when you're left with few enough.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#85

Very cool. Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of rocks and tell me how to put them together to build a wall with minimal space between them. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/stone-wall-texture-pict... Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

There's lots of papers about that algorithm used on warehouse box stocking.

More generalised, the act of putting them together is a subset of bin packing, which is certainly one of the more studied problems of computer science, though NP-hard, and having a pile of rocks of different size complicates things substantially. Getting a decent approximation once you know the dimensions of the rocks is probably doable, but minimising the labour necessary to get the scans you need of each rock is also a huge challenge.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#86
post #83

Won't the amount of variations possible in the bricks be very limited? A full size brick, a half brick, a 3/4 brick and sizes in between. Isn't the app then going to give the same set of recommendations for almost every brick pile? In that case is it even a brick scanning app anymore? Post read edit: Facepalm. This is about Lego bricks!

A prime example of how comments made without reading the article look like.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#87

Just yesterday my 9 year-old proudly revealed his latest flying creation, created - as almost all our children's Lego builds are - entirely out of his own imagination and from the multiple tubs of bricks that sit next to his bed. Each new Lego boxed set gets built from the instructions exactly once. Admired for a while (days to months), then duly ripped to bits and the pieces are used to build much better things that…

the externalisation of human abilities into machines is going to be a major theme in your offsprings life and encountering this app could inspire interest in how automation is achieved.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#88
post #43

What I remember from childhood was that you were often looking for a particular piece you knew you had, but could not find it. This app could be useful for that.

Having recently done some moderately frustrating builds for the first time since my age was in single digits, I discovered that a small amount of pre-sorting radically improved this situation. And it doesn't seem to matter what parameter you index on: colour, size, type - anything to reduce the search space seems to work. Nor does the sort need to be complete. Just reducing the size of the unsorted pile also helps.

When my son was still interested and I was building with him, I did not have the patience to pre-sort, but I used to casually sort while searching for a piece, and so the search time for subsequent pieces would gradually drop.

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#89
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often: Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of socks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect match. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/socks-pile-texture-pict... Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

Not so fast. Sock magic: I've only bought black socks over the last 5 year, and still I can't seem to find ones anymore that exactly match in both fitting and color (they all seem to have degraded in different color tones)

Re: Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions

#90
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often: Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of socks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect match. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/socks-pile-texture-pict... Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

I only have black ones and a couple of white ones for sports. The white ones are fine, but the black socks get significantly brighter over time. Now sorting almost matching socks is much harder than when I had a hodgepodge. Admittedly I mostly ignore the differences in shade but it doesn't sit well with me.

A sock sorter would be perfect.

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