A Lego BB-8 Hemisphere!

Wow, it's starting to look like what it's supposed to be!  For once I don't really have to explain what it's supposed to look like!


Lego BB-8 Hemisphere!

Though, again, some bits are complicated, so the red dots are substituting for missing bricks and showing where the white triangle panel buttons go.

Part of the reason building slowed down is that I'd only digitally designed panel 3 so far.  So while Lara was building the orange rings for the panels, I first had to design the pattern layout for the other panels on the computer. 

As I mentioned last time, the body is made of 6 panels designed to fit together into a sphere.  Conveniently BB-8 has 6 hatches, so each panel has one of the hatches in the middle.  Here's a view of the three completed panels, arranged as they attach.

Lego BB-8 Panels 6, 3, and 5 

We ran into a few problems this time.  First of all, when I'd ordered bricks we only had the design for Panel Three, so I just multiplied that times 6 for the six panels and padded the order a bit.  What I didn't think about was that maybe the other panels would want a different shape of brick, so the design ended up with a few in less-than-convenient sizes.  We made do, but it was annoying and used more bricks that I'd wanted.

The other problem is going to be a lot harder to solve.  Individually the panels are pretty strong, but they don't really attach at very many points.  Trying to arrange the panels for the picture above they wanted to fall apart, and even started splitting at the layers within the panels. 

I finally got it to stay together long enough for the photo, but this isn't going to work for a static (non-moving) model that has to sit for more than ten minutes, let alone a model that's supposed to drive around and interact with folks.  I have several ideas to solve the problem, but it's not going to be trivial; we'll see how hard it ends up being.

You can see symptoms of this problem in the interior photo below.  The white lines in the middle are where the bricks were separated enough to allow light to leak in from the lights outside.


Lego BB-8 Interior showing splitting seams

Here it is a little more zoomed out.  I wanted you guys to be able to see how the panels are designed to attach to each other with a reasonably smooth join for the "hamster" robot to run around on.


Lego BB-8 Interior

Well, now I need to go design the next 3 panels... and figure out what to do to make it stronger.

Time to start building a Lego BB-8

Well, ordering ELEVEN THOUSAND Lego bricks (plus a few extras) takes a while. In the meantime I wanted to make a little helper template. The inside of BB-8 needs to be hollow so that our "hamster" robot can drive the body. So that means smooth. This Lego brick jig helps fill the void so that I can make sure I'm not invading the interior space when I build the model.  We have a digital file, but this helps reduce the errors.

 

It has a bunch of eyes because I needed flat tiles, after all, I don't want the panels to stick to the jig.  And eyes were cheap on "The Lego Wall" at the local Lego Store.



Initial jig for BB-8 interior shape.

Originally I was just going to do one quarter and mirror it, but decided that was too awkward, so I built another half.  The ordered Lego brick hadn't arrived, but I did have some loos brick.  Enough to do a few layers before I ran out of brick.

Start of the first edge of "Panel 3" of BB-8.

Eventually we got more brick and I could build more.  Different bricks are in different boxes, and basically the build area is a huge mess... I'd rather build than organize :)

BB-8 Build area.

Here's a closer view of the panel half built.  The jig is visible here, I didn't build the whole thing since the 2nd half is just a mirror.  You can see that there's a purple inner sphere in the digital model too, serving the same purpose: to keep the real shell model from invading into the interior of the sphere.

Jig and BB-8 building area

Of course I started more as soon as the first bricks started arriving, which meant that I ran out of the bits needed for the corners and had to stop.