November 2009 Raleigh, NC Window Into the Community Display

I recently built and installed a display for the Raleigh, NC LEGO store. My display, titled "LEGO Castle Through the Years", will be visible in the Window Into the Community (a special store window at LEGO stores that features creations by local builders - in this case it's in the back of the store, to your left as you look at the Pick-A-Brick wall) through the end of the month. For those of you who haven't been into LEGO Castle sets from the 1970's to today, the layout uses a variety of popular sets and minifigs from over the years - the landscaping and overall layout is an original design (as is the mill building styled similarly to the 10193 Medieval Market Village set), but most of the layout closely follows popular LEGO sets from over the years. Notable sets here include 375 Yellow Castle, 6066 Camouflaged Outpost, and 6038 Wolfpack Renegades. A few classic minifigs from various LEGO Castle lines show up as well - see if you can spot Majisto. The tree from 10193 Medieval Market Villagemakes an appearance too, but I decided to use an original mill building (which, of course, has a working water wheel and grindstone) to represent peasants instead of using a building from the current set (as a current high-ticket item, 10193 is already displayed in the store for sales purposes).

Matthew (Brickapolis) was at the swap-out and got some set-up photos. These are mostly for seeing me set up my display, but you can also get a glimpse of my tree technique. You can see the rest of Matthew's photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brickapolis/tags/nov/

My photos can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/tags/november/ . I may add more photos later - I've been surprised to see how some details have come out in the end. A cave that I was afraid would be hidden turned out to actually be perfectly visible from a child's eye level, but appears to be covered by the large tree in the front when looking at it from an adult eye level. That's the only highlight that the brightly-lit display area has brought to my attention so far, but there may be others. I'd also like to try getting some photos with less glare - we'll have to see if I can get my camera back in there soon.

Vision Command XP Install

Mostly noting this for personal reference (I'm still rushing to set software up for this weekend's show):

I originally tried the approach prescribed at this site: http://www.abs-robotics.com/tips/install/winxp/download.asp to get Vision Command running. All 5 files were ran, but when it came time for the registry update, I ran into a bug because apparently I didn't have RIS 2.0 in the default install directory (RIS 2.0 is on there, of course, and thanks to Cary selling me a new USB IR tower on the cheap, I got it to work again shortly before I started again in trying to install Vision Command).

After that failed, I tried following the advice seen on this website (the second result for "vision command xp" on Google): http://www.ntcompatible.com/Vision_Command_Updater_LEGO_t23827.html - so far, so good, but it's rebooting now. We'll all see soon enough if I'm able to successfully launch an air-guitar system before Saturday morning...it's really the last big goal left.

Oh, and before anyone starts wondering: Yes, I tried doing the properly nerdy thing and interfacing an NXT with the Logitech SDK. I didn't get very far, and I figured this program could be simple enough just to try in a kid-oriented graphical language. Sure, I don't get to do anything to show off my fancy Computer Science college-learning, but at some level just the novelty of having a working LEGO guitar player controlled by air-guitar playing children is already exciting.