Subject:
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Re: BlockCAD, LDRAW, MLCad etc. mentioned in Swedish technical weekly magazine
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Thu, 11 Oct 2001 22:53:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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914 times
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Anders' scans:
http://www.nyteknik.se/pub/pub42_3.asp?art_id=17637
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=7513
My quick'n'dirty translation
/Tore
Legoland is in Cyberspace
Lego models are build with simple CAD programs [011010]
"All PC technicians have without exception spent an enormous part of their
childhood with Lego", Douglas Coupland writes in his book Microserfs.It is
possible that a lot of engineers also have done and still do it as adults.
Let us tell you about asome adults with technically oriented jobs who have
picked up the Lego of their childhood, but now the parts have moved in to
their computers.
An article in Ny Teknik in the autumn of 1997 about a simple graphic program
for building with blocks, Gryphon Bricks, startled Anders Isaksson to
download a demo of the program. In a mail to Ny Teknik CAD, he writes that
he "quite quickly got tired of its slowness and limitations, but was
facinated by the idea" of Gryphon Bricks and thought that "I can do this
equally good myself".
For the programmer Anders Isaksson it became more or less obvious that hw
could build a program that he and his children could enjoy better than the
one he read about in Ny Teknik. One year later, he published the Lego-CAD
program Blockcad on the internet. And now, almost four years later, he
thinks that there are about 1000 BlockCAD users all over the world.
- I ask those who download and enjoy it to to mail a Lego part to me. Some
send single parts, some send entire models or kits. I now have a shelf at
home with about 100 packages I recieved this way, he says.
But there are obviously a lot more users than that. He has recieved about
1000 BlockCAD related e-mails through the years. It is impossible to
estimate exactly how many users there are since it's available free of
charge. Like the other people we spoke to about CAD-like programs, Anders
points us to LDraw and www.lugnet.com.
It started sometimes in the mid 90's with the Australian James Jessiman,
creator of LDraw and its file format. Tore Eriksson was one of those who
were there when it started. With his own Lego CAD program SimLego, he was in
contact with Jessiman, he tells in a mail to Ny Teknik CAD. And he created
SimLego because he thought that "making a CAD model should be like building
with Lego... so I started playing with making a Lego emulator. When I posted
it to rec.toys.lego, the response was enormeous." He exchanged ideas and
code with Jessiman and the other LDraw people and later a mailing list and
www.ldraw.org and www.lugnet.com came out of it.
Despite that Tore put so much time and effort to develope SimLego, he soon
abandoned that project for LDraw. He and many others are now contributing
new parts to the impressive LDraw compatible Lego parts library.
Lugnet.com is a meeting place for all Lego related things between heaven and
earth. According to Tore Eriksson, Lugnet is" a remarkable and fantastic
phenomenon. Some enthusiasts with a special interest come together and
creates a global vitual group. Within this group, even smaller and even more
specialized sub-groups are made (CAD, robotics, space, animation and so on).
It reminds me of non-profit associations. Officials from the Lego company
have even joined our L-Cad summits."
Like the others, Tore calls the CAD related activity L-cad because Legocad
is a commercial product that has no connection to the non-profit activity of
Lugnet.
L-cad is not just a game to Anders Isaksson, Tore Eriksson, and the other
people we've been in contact with. Anders tells that BlockCAD has also been
used in more serious contexts around the world. He has found ten references
to school work. In Australia , it is used in the computer education of 11
years old children. It is used as an introduction of CAD for 12-13 years old
pupils in Sydney. Examples like that come from USA, Austria, Holland, and
Germany. But nothing indicates similar usage in Sweden or Denmark, Lego's
country of origin.
As a programmer at C E Johansson in Eskiltuna, he has had the benifit of the
"grapic engine" he wrote to BlockCAD. Tobbe Arnesson, support technician at
ABB used L-cad to "quickly illustrate ideas for my fellow (Adult Fan Of
Lego, AFOLs) on the internet". He has also seen other ares of usage, like
illustratiion of a technical solution. See exemples at
www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk/jen/lego/hooklift.htm.
Tore Eriksson, IT support at Flextronics in Katrineholm, has had even more
use of his interest of L-cad. He tells that his experences from L-cad is
one of the reasons that he got his job, and by "the complexity in this
hobby, I had to leave the spaghetti coding, been forced to structure and dig
deeper into object oriented programming."
(((It's late - skipping Douglas Coupland, Gryphon Bricks, and
Lego+Unigraphics)))
BUILD LEGO MODELS WITH FREEWARE
(((Info on and links to...)))
Ldraw - www.lugnet.com and www.ldraw.org
MLCad (Michael Lachman cad) - www.lm-software.com/mlcad/
LDlite ( www.gyugyi.com/l3g0/ldlite/).
LDGlite - www.ldraw.org/reference/linux
Leocad - www.leocad.org/
Blockcad - user.tninet.se/~hbh828t/proglego.htm
Simlego - home2.swipnet.se/~w-20413/simlego.htm
Brickdraw for Mac - olson.pair.com/ brickdraw3d/
Legocad - www.lego.com
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | BlockCAD, LDRAW, MLCad etc. mentioned in Swedish technical weekly magazine
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| Hello! Today one of the largest (weekly) technical magazines in Sweden, 'Ny Teknik', had an article about Lego CAD programs, and some of the people using them. The article was in the CAD supplement of the mag, and had half the front page, and the (...) (23 years ago, 11-Oct-01, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.general)
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