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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

#161

Post by lupire »

spapas82 wrote: post #152
soared wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild to comment that someone’s app for identifying legos doesn’t identify not legos.

These bricks are exactly the same as normal legos and of course they are compatible. I can't differentiate from real legos unless I check if they have the lego logo on them. So I'm not sure this is a problem with these bricks...

They are not the same. They are made of cheaper plastic with looser tolerances, leading to builds that bend or fall apart. And they don't have the tiny LEGO imprint they advertises the quality of the mold and tolerance.

None of that should affect the performance of the app, though.

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

#162

Post by xrd »

Taxi drivers enlarge their hippocampus by navigating around and learning routes. I definitely feel like Google Maps has affected my ability in certain somehow tangentially related areas to my detriment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm

This kind of thing is cool, but seems like it robs us of an opportunity to practice something important.

Maybe we will replace it with some other skill?

I would be very curious to know how many AI/ML researchers played with Legos and whether this free play was vital in their development. I would assume it is.

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

#163

Post by lupire »

gnicholas wrote: post #25
wnolens wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno my time is worth more than that per hour. And sorting all those pieces will take more than an hour. So.. it's cheap.

I assumed many of the users are kids, whose time per hour is worth hardly anything. If they didn't have this app, they'd instead just play with the Legos the old-fashioned way, which accomplishes roughly the same goals. This seems neat, and if there were some basic functionality (only smaller projects, or a limited number of complex projects per month), I would give it a try with my kid. But there is zero chance I'm…

Finding all the pieces for a build is easy. What's practically impossible is finding a kit that works with your pieces (unless you manually inventory them).

Half the value of LEGO kits is the guaranteed build of the project on the box. This app is a recycling tool for creating kits from "scrap" LEGO.

You are paying the all to avoid buying the new kit.

> zero chance I'm going to introduce a subscription that costs $7/mo

If you buy $50-$200 LEGO kits, you'd buy $84/yr tools.

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

#164

Post by rpvnwnkl »

zhte415 wrote: post #155
taneq wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the trick here is to buy all your socks at the same time, and open all the packs at once. Don't just open a pack every now and then, or they'll age differently and you get the variation in wear and tear. Then once you're down to a few days' worth of raggedy socks, throw them all out at once and open the next batch. (Source: Am a fellow black-sock-only person who made the above mistake last time around.)

This requires sock drawer/shelf management. Socks will form a FOFI stack where clean pairs will be taken from the top, worn, washed and returned to the top of the stack while other clean pairs sit beneath without being touched. Those at the top of the stack will wear out faster. Mitigation might include not washing any socks until all clean pairs are exhausted, but this may result in a smelly linen bin. Alternatives…

For my drawers I stack horizontal, old on the left and new fresh washed come in on the right. So you can see what you’ve been wearing and what you haven’t worn for a while and choose accordingly. Works for shirts, socks, underwear, etc.

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

#165

Post by lupire »

regularfry wrote: post #63
mongol wrote: 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.

Then kids play once and wreck your presort.

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

#167

Post by gnicholas »

ehzy wrote: post #6
gnicholas wrote: post #5

Is there any free functionality aside from the time-based trial? It looks like this is $45/year (or $84/year if paid monthly!), which seems pretty steep.

I mean, I'm not into Lego, but considering what this app does this seems like a pretty fair price. It's doubtless fairly involved to create something like this. It even gives you stylized step by step instruction on how to build then thing it invents for you!

According to others, it does not invent the items — these are submitted by users.

Seems like they could run a CourseHero-style business model, where you get access for X months in return for uploading Y creations. Some people would submit junk, but you would get enough good stuff that it would be worth it. Also, you could make the default value for submissions low, but give big bonuses for submissions that reach a certain level of popularity.

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

#169

Post by xani_ »

ttcbj wrote: post #124

To be honest, what I love about legos is the free play aspect. When I play with my kids, (now 8 and 10), I find that the key thing is not what pieces we have (admittedly, we have a lot of pieces), or instructions, but developing some theme or challenge. The theme could be ‘space’ or ‘under water’ or ‘I’m going to build the taller possible leg structure’ or ‘I’m going to build a vehicle that can be blown across the fl…

The thing with creativity is that it is not just "inventing things out of thin air". It's picking thru the vast archives of things we've seen and did our brain has and applying it in different way.

Guided building is basically filling that archive with ideas that can be used or changed

"Theme of the day" or just "pick a theme for me" might be interesting, but so is just getting some random schematic that might not even fit in what you'd search for in the first place

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

#170

Post by silviot »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #142
silviot wrote: post #108

I subscribed to the free trial for the Play store app, tried it a bit, and now I'd like to cancel my subscription. I found a "Manage subscriptions" link in the app, and it points to the Play Store app. I can't find an "unsubscribe" button there. If I try o uninstall the app I'm explicitly told "Your active subscriptions will not be canceled". I spent ten minutes looking for this, and I'm a web developer. How on earth…

Realistically you shouldn’t be allowed to unsub without first posting your impressions on HN

I loved the AI driven piece recognition. It worked great! But all the things around it are not that good for the price I'd be paying. In particular, I'd like to be able to use the recognition to build a small db of all the pieces I have in each box, so that when I can't find a piece I can use the db to help locate it. I believe it would have worked better, instead of building an app and targeting end user, to build an API service and target developers. This way many different products could be made with this feature.
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