January 16, 2001

2:55 PM

It looks like LEGO has licensed Eric Harshbarger's Pixelego Mosaic program. The cool part? You upload an image to the Lego servers, and they send you "building instruction, a mounting panel, a wall hanger and 1,936 bricks to build [the] mosaic"
posted by alana (8 comments total)

That goes far beyond excellent. The price is decent, too, given how expensive Lego is.
posted by hijinx at 3:01 PM on January 16, 2001

Hmm.. yeah this is kinda cool. Where's that link of that guy that build a working clock and Alice from wonderland in lego?
posted by tiaka at 3:30 PM on January 16, 2001

Same guy.. just go to ericharshbarger.com/lego.
posted by zempf at 3:47 PM on January 16, 2001

Wow, I want one! This is much bigger than a toy for kids. Lego art rulez!
posted by timothompson at 3:52 PM on January 16, 2001

I've learned something from this... When your friend emails you to say that he's just built a 'to scale' model of R2D2, do not think that the bulb has grown dim. I can see now that there was a method to his madness.
posted by heather at 4:43 PM on January 16, 2001

It really does work remarkably well. I found it choked a little on larger images, better results with images of about 300x300 pixels. That might have been because of my 28.8 modem, though...?
You can see a result on my site (hope that doesn't count as self-promotion).
posted by normy at 4:52 PM on January 16, 2001

I try to visit the Lego site. Nope:

No cookie. To access this site your browser must be accepting cookies.

What is this - Fred frickcking Durst punishing a naughty child: "No cookie"? And Mr. Browser did have cookies enabled.
posted by joeclark at 5:54 PM on January 16, 2001

That they'll pack everything up into one package for you is pretty neat (and pretty easy to automate), but the software itself is no great shakes. I did some code many many moons ago to render an image in M&M's--a slightly harder task due to the alternating alignment of rows, but essentially the same thing: Floyd Steinberg dithering to a limited palette. Sadly lost in the great PowerBook disk crash of 1996.
posted by plinth at 6:17 AM on January 17, 2001