Feb 19

Vulpine Sea Power

Green technologies should never have to live apart in ghettos and isolated monocultures. Vulpine Sea Power is a division of Vulpine Designs Unlimited and will see to it that your renewables can be combined in the most creative and productive ways possible, utilising the philosophy of Freedom Of Form to make functionality elegant.

The following are initial concept images and descriptions created in a limited palette of digital LEGO(R) bricks (before I discovered LEGO Universe mode, hence the weird colour scheme) of the first Vulpine Sea Power innovation which needs to be taken to the next level: presenting the Mean Green Marine Electricity Machine, MeGMEM.

Vulpine Sea Power MeGMEM 1
Quote source: me, 15th May 2010 on the DeviantArt pages:

Vulpine Sea Power brings to you this cross between invention, engineering and art, the Mean Green Marine Electricity Machines; a combination wind, tidal, wave and solar power station all built into an offshore platform tower complete with its own substation and auxiliary capacity to add conventional offshore wind farms and/or couple together with more of its kind. Scalable, robust, reliable and with power generated no matter what the weather, these MeGMEMs will solve your country’s green electricity needs at the flick of a switch!

This model was created based on an original idea to combine the renewables that can be used at sea and is not based on any real construction or place. It is intended to be an idea to take to renewable energy companies, and handily shows off Vulpine Designs Unlimited’s abilities in offshore platforms, tidal, wave, solar and wind projects (e.g. Lego models to be used as planning aids, NIMBY elimination etc.).

Inspired by:
British Sea Power
current offshore wind farm projects
art by various people depicting wind turbines in clusters and ‘trees’.
My own idea had a good few months ago for a combined renewable energy power station

Please abide by the Creative Commons license on this one to the letter.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 2

The lower part of a MeGMEM – everything below the tidal booms would be submerged, and the towers could be built to heights to suit sea depth.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 3

Methinks the real thing might have safety rails around this substation, it being elevated so high above the waves to reduce corrosion on the transformers and switching gear… ah well.

With further thoughts, it might as well have a proper roof and walls of some kind over the substation if that’s practicable at the voltages we’re dealing with. The wind turbine columns would help hold the building in place and it’d keep seagulls off the substation. And it could be a solar panel roof. And walls. And solar PV coated columns. This idea is stuffed with renewable energy opportunities.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 4

The landing platforms just above high tide + swell level overlook the hollow interior of the tower, which fills with sea water as the tide comes in and empties as it goes out, turning the tidal turbines below. The mighty columns support the substation and turbines above, and contain the cables for them.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 5

The wave power generators and the solar panels are attached to booms which are fastened to floats that slide up and down with the swell and the tide in slots on the corner of the tower. The solar panels are held high enough above the wave generators to float over any wave crests, whilst being boat-accessible for repair.

Where used in rougher seas, the solar panels could be mounted higher or just on the tower itself and its columns.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 6

The tidal generators are built into the walls just below low tide level, and again lower in the tower base (extra useful in areas with strong currents)

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 7

Looking up from underneath, you can see the tidal turbines inside the tower…
Enough to give you vertigo.
Or the Bends.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 8

Wave and solar power booms, with beacon lights to warn vessels (though an area of these things would be surrounded with buoys anyway).

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 9

Our little copse of wind turbines, elevated into the wind and just far enough apart not to clash with each other. The columns holding them up are a cantilever balance design. Build this in Lego for real and it’ll be 5½ to 6 feet tall. In Real Life? Erm, huge.

The turbines don’t have to be that high above the sea, really. This was just to see if I could set them high enough to get clearer air when it’s really windy and there’s a hefty swell flinging spray around. The design’s a concept and highly adjustable.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 10

As viewed from the sea.
WIND POWER!!!!1!!one!exclamationmark!!!1

Quite. The cross-shaped thing is to tie them together and gives a possible spot for a helipad in a future iteration of the design.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 11

My favourite picture. *Wants a print*

Thinking about it, you’d probably need a helicopter for this view. I hope it can be an electric helicopter.

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 12

Normal offshore wind turbines can be attached to this system too, using a MeGMEM for a substation. Showing the ballast counterweight roots of the turbines here, normally the sea would be up to the chain/rope clamps. Also, gotta love LDD’s backgrounds here, they’ve really come into their own.

Having seen the success of the Strangford Lough tidal current power generator, I posit that similar generators could be fastened to the bases of auxiliary marine wind turbines at the ends of the wave power booms. Indeed, why the heck doesn’t the Strangford Lough tidal turbine have a wind turbine on top of it?

Vulpine Sea Power: MeGMEM 13

The last picture in the series for the time being: a solitary offshore wind turbine. These and their landlubber brothers are available in real Lego(R) form for purchase from us, pre-built or as parts with instructions, as is almost everything posted here.

MeGMEMs near the shore could also be coupled up with EcoTricity SeaRaser style generators too, and those away from the shore could do something similar, but using large water tanks on the tower just below the substation, which could double up as freshwater towers for water supplies for seafarers or to be piped to the mainland, through rainwater harvesting and small scale desalination.
The towers themselves could be purpose-built, or converted from military platforms like the micronation of Sealand.
The more I think about this, the more ideas I have to couple onto it.

Enquiries regarding collaboration, business partnerships, expansion of the idea and its eventual implementation are openly encouraged. Please see the Contact Us page for an email form.

Feb 19

FREEDOM OF FORM. Setting out our WHY.

Vulpine Designs Unlimited at first glance may appear to have a narrow range. Nothing could be further from the truth: LEGO(R) was just a convenient starting place.
The new slogan/tagline/motto thingy, indeed the whole WHY for Vulpine Designs Unlimited is ‘Freedom Of Form’, which accurately reflects what the long term aims of the business are about.

I believe in Freedom Of Form with a seriously strong passion. It is what my working life will be dedicated to in the long term, and Vulpine Designs Unlimited explores ways to achieve this and to help others to achieve it too, in every context possible and currently impossible alike. Unlimited we are and ever more Unlimited will we become.

Freedom Of Form. Our world needs it.

Sort of like this
with a bit of this
in the style of this

Feb 06

Business Mode Activated.

I hereby declare that Vulpine Designs Unlimited is now srs bsns.

Why is the world’s approach to design about to change over the coming decades?
Where can you find the fusion between that which we grow up learning how to construct representations of life around us with and the actual application back into the real world of ideas produced in that medium?
Who has the designs on a green future, and who sees their potential for what it truly is; Unlimited?
How can a plastic shape correspond to anything from a piece of a machine to an atom or even a quark?
What do you say to a future that uses our childhoods for inspiration that will make the world better for our children?

There are many answers to these questions, but only one answer to them all: Vulpine Designs Unlimited.

Unite your green energy with Vulpine Sea Power.
Point the way with Vulpinde Signs Unlimited.
Build the efficient computing power you need with Vulpine Computing.
Show us your own ideas to get in on the action with Thine Designs.
Plan and model, work together and combine the previously assumed to be separate for the benefit of us all with Vulpine Designs Unlimited.

Jan 18

For WDS and for those who wish to save water and the money it costs:

Why do toilets use so much water? Let’s save some money and water by converting existing WCs to be dual-flush.
www.aqualogic-wc.com have this marvellous contraption one can install on the siphon to reduce water consumption, called the ecoBETA.

WDS recently requested I (as their employee) find ‘Eco-Tech’ to present to local businesses. They never stipulated I couldn’t also use it for Vulpine Designs Unlimited purposes as far as I recall. Vulpine Designs Unlimited is simply one of the businesses this Eco-Tech is being ‘presented to’. ;-)

So, presenting both first and second hand simultaneously, as an employee of WDS and as the Chief Executive of Vulpine Designs Unlimited respectively, instructions for how to fit the ecoBETA based on my experiences.

http://www.vulpinedesigns.co.uk/downloads/ecoBETAmanual.odt

Sep 08

The Wall Street Journal Journal Entry

The following is an email conversation between myself and a journalist from the Wall Street Journal. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Hello,

I’m a reporter with the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, and I’m intrigued by the world of digital modeling of lego models. One thing that particularly interests me is hacking of LDD, which I’ve seen discussed on some blogs.

Would you be able to offer some perspective on whether LDD hacking to get extra pieces/colors is an issue in LDD modeling communities? It seems it was an issues several years ago, but debate seems to have died down.

I’m curious because stealing Lego pieces from a store would clearly be immoral/illegal, but I’m not clear whether fiddling with computer code is considered similar.

Any thoughts or perspetive on this would be most welcome.

Many thanks.
Dan Michaels

The Wall Street Journal
Brussels, Belgium

Reply:

Hello,

First off, it is probably clear from the images on my site that I use Lego parts from Lego Digital Designer that are not available for purchase in real life. The lack of certain colours for certain parts used to be a very contentious bugbear of practically every user of the LDD software. This left the Lego Group with a real quandary: they wanted to allow people’s creativity to run free without giving the false impression that their factories had the capacity to make every brick in every colour all of the time.

For a few years, Lego Digital Designer presented a limited palette of bricks and colours to match with what could be made available through the online ‘Lego Factory’ (later renamed ‘DesignByMe’) service. People could design models in LDD using any colour so long as it could be bought. The limitations were quickly made apparent to anyone trying to make an accurate representation of anything in real life using this software. It was and still to some degree is, after all, the most intuitive Lego CAD software out there, LDraw and its derivatives proving to be unreliable and out of date for quite a while.

With this frustrating situation in mind, adult fans of Lego (AFOLs) such as myself were left to seek a workaround. One was indeed found, and all it involved was editing one configuration settings file in the installation. A hack, but an oddly simple one. As it turned out, the very viability of this ‘hack’ proved that Lego had up their sleeves what everyone had been asking for; and with version 4 of LDD, Lego Universe integrated with Lego Digital Designer, allowing anyone using LDD to legitimately create models with any brick in any colour digitally, although the separate palette for DesignByMe remains limited for the simple reason that we can’t buy bricks that haven’t ever been manufactured.

Meanwhile, the LDraw community have been busily getting their act together and recently have created new front-end programs such as SR3D and Konstruktor, which now introduce some much needed ease of use into the original open-source Lego CAD scene that later inspired Lego to fund LDD. The future looks bright for the Lego CAD world, with quality improving in all quarters and no fiddling with LDD’s actual code has ever really happened as far as I am aware beyond a simple config file edit that is now included officially by default.

For more information on LDraw, please see [link] and for more information on Lego Digital Designer, please see [link] . If you want to run LDD on Linux, please use Wine, from [link]


My own role in this is as a user who occasionally generates feedback and sometimes makes money from my art created using this software – but if you’d like to advertise Vulpine Designs Unlimited at [link] in your paper, as long as the article does not lose context, content or meaning I’ll be happy. ;-)

Please keep me up to date on whether this makes it to publication.

Daniel Davies
CEF
Vulpine Designs Unlimited
Bournemouth, Dorset, UK

Reply to my reply:

Hi Daniel,

Belated thanks for your comprehensive and informative email.

I am continuing to poke around on this to see if there’s a story to be done, and will keep you posted if I pursue it.

Best regards,

Dan

Dan Michaels

The Wall Street Journal

(Address details deleted by Vulpine Designs Unlimited for spam/junk mail avoidance) Brussels

Belgium

Aug 04

ALL GLORY TO THE LEGO HYPNOTOAD

ALL GLORY TO THE LEGO HYPNOTOAD
ALL GLORY TO THE FLASHING GIF OF THE LEGO HYPNOTOAD

Hypnotoad is copyright of Matt Groening and is from Everybody Loves Hypnotoad on Futurama.

BTW, to make it a little more interesting, I can now add that the glorious Hypnotoad model is designed for optional LED wiring into the eyes

Jul 21

Holy Lego Mosaic, Batman!

Here’s the latest from the LEGO(R) designs, a Batman-themed thank you plaque for a local teacher at the end of a great school year for my half-sister-not-yet-in-law. A wonderfully simple-yet-effective gift and a marvellous way to say thank you from a Lego lover to a Batman fan!

CAD render image

The finished mosaic image

EDIT 22.7.11 I have now been informed that this gift went down very well with the teacher, who says he has ‘never seen the like’. Another happy customer :-)

Please remember that Batman and the Batman logo are copyright of DC Comics.

May 30

Bike Trailer

At Vulpine Designs Unlimited we have no room to park any motor vehicles, hence the business is based on orders delivered to your door. To get around this slight inconvenience, I decided to create something both environmentally friendly and practical whilst at the same time being small enough to fit through our hallway and alley. Based on the design at Re-Cycle.org, this bike trailer is a great way to shift larger objects or quantities of items without adding to our carbon footprint and is itself made from a recycled bicycle, a recycled recycling box, a ladder and a pipe bender!
Work In Progress image of bike trailer before modification
Click the picture above to see the work-in-progress gallery.
Starting with a Townsend Impulse bike, I dismantled it, removing the wheels, the seat, the reflectors, the chain, the brakes, the derailleurs, the front fork and the handlebars.
Then I cut the frame on the top bar behind the handlebar column, a few inches above and also a little below the top bar on the seat column, and below the rear wheel hooks to release the upper rear forks, using a hacksaw with a new blade.
Diagram of the cuts and drill holes on the frame.
The top tube/bar slotted together perfectly with the front fork. The handlebar inner column, meanwhile, fitted nicely into the lower seat column, which is attached to the other end of the top tube/bar.
I lined up the desired angle of inclination for the towing arm (top tube) on the front fork, then drilled a hole through both and bolted them together with a 50mm roof bolt.
I drilled large holes in the sides of a small stepladder to take the wheelnuts and attach them to it near the curved top. Where the forks taper around the wheels, a pair of brake bosses could be found on each. At first I thought these could be fastened through the ladder frame directly, however this left the trailer wheels non-parallel. Using old computer case steel, my drill, a pair of phone books and tin-snips, I fashioned a pair of spacer brackets to hold the brake bosses and so the forks the right distance from the ladder frame to make the wheels parallel enough and held on with 50mm roof bolts.
I also used the bottom bar from the bike frame, including some of the handlebar outer column, to act as a rigidity bar across both forks’ brake & reflector bracket holes with more 50mm roof bolts.
The coupling on the towing arm is made from half a 22mm diameter pipe bender, brake cable and the handlebars.
First, cut the handlebars to one side of where the central bracket holds them to the column. Remove any remaining brake or gear handles and the rubber handle from this piece, and use a hammer and anvil (or failing that, concrete surface) to flatten one end. Do not try to use a small metalwork vice like mine, this only ruins the vice. If you have a large enough vice, however, use it. Drill three holes in this piece: one large and one small in the flat end of the tube, and one large in the semi-flattened taper of the tube to thread the brake cable through. The rubber handle can be re-used on the seat column left sticking out of the upper rear fork as a towing handle.
Cut the remainder of the handlebar in two and cut a notch in the end of the piece with the middle bracket usually around it.
Cut the pipe-bender roughly in half (aim to have 3.25 inches or so exposed between the handlebar pieces) using a hacksaw and pliers with serious caution due to the springy nature of pipe-bender. Don’t try to rush this.
Whichever half you think is the right one, it’ll probably be the other that you need. Pick the one that fits the handlebars best so that there isn’t too long or short an exposed length when both ends are fitted over it. Thread the brake cable through its large hole and an eye-bolt in the small hole. Leave semi-loose until the other end has been tied off around the notch, having been threaded up the inside of the pipe bender. Then tighten as tight as it can go without deforming the pipe bender. Ensure the spare cable is aimed away from the other large hole to avoid getting in the way.
The towing bar can then be attached to your bike’s rear wheel hub through the large hole. I also recommend the use of an elastic bungee cord stretched down from your bike’s carrier to prevent the coupling from loosening and dropping to the ground.
A box for the trailer was found in the form of an old recycling tub obtained years ago from a defunct-at-the-time-but-now-re-invigorated Kerbside recycling firm. With holes drilled at carefully selected points in the bottom, to match with where holes can be drilled in the ladder’s steps, I threaded bolts through those steps and then lowered the box onto them, using large washers to spread the pressure of the tightened nuts on the plastic. All that then remains is paint: I suggest a red oxide primer (particularly on the cut and drilled parts) and metal paint either by Hammerite or, for a colour not in their range, Halford’s mix-while-you-wait paint service (NB: strong fumes, use outdoors only). For decorating the box, Humbrol Enamel. Take care to avoid drips and spills.
This done, you’ll have a bike trailer that can lug a fair weight (limits yet to be tested – but I have stood on the ladder frame prior to the box being attached with no ill effects).
Originally, it had been intended for the ladder to still be able to fold out and be used if the trailer was tipped on end. This ended up not being the case here, but I’d like to see if someone else can make one that does this. Bike trailer transformer…

(Updates will be made to this post)

Feb 16

Piaggio, Lego. Lego, Piaggio. Vespa. Buon.

Have a skeg at this! The latest commission by Vulpine Designs Unlimited: a Piaggio Vespa scooter for the Norwich Scooterists! Mods are awesome (especially when they’re paying customers :-P ).
Vespa picture CAD1
Here’s the best of classic mod scooters resplendent in the colours of the Norwich Scooterists.
That’s an Italian scooter modelled in Danish bricks for a British subculture group.
Vespa model1
The wheels turn, the handlebars steer the front wheel, the brake handles can be squeezed, the mirror can be adjusted and the start pedal even moves up and down! Also, quite by happy accident, there are front and rear suspension setups of sorts, although a couple of springs from ballpoint pens might make that better.
comparison vespa
This design is based on a Vespa belonging to a member of the Norwich Scooterists, for whom this was a commissioned birthday present. I’m told he’s very pleased with it.
‘LEGO’, ‘Piaggio’, ‘Vespa’, ‘Coca Cola’ and ‘Norwich Scooterists’ are all trademarks or at least copyright of their respective owners.
The original Vespa shape and style are copyright of Piaggio. This is just a scale model representation of that iconic scooter.

If you’d like your Vespa or anything else in Lego, don’t hesitate to contact us.
There are more pictures including a couple taken during the construction process in our DeviantArt gallery and Facebook photo albums.

Feb 07

The Lego HTPC Challenge

Here at Vulpine Designs, we’re always up for a challenge, but this was a tricky one. Could I turn one broken laptop into something a bit more useful? In 5 hours? Let’s see how I got on:

The laptop, as you can see, was not in the best of states. Its screen had cracked, causing the large black blobs everywhere, and in addition, it had taken to turning completely white at random intervals. For the techies amongst you, it was a Compaq A935 17″ laptop with a Pentium dual-core processor, 2GB ram, 160GB hard drive and Intel GMA graphics.
laptop

The first part was to dismantle the laptop, so that I could get at the motherboard, which I could then build the new PC around. This was rather difficult – laptops have screws everywhere, and they can be screwed in very tightly. I must admit to forcibly breaking the plastic casing around a couple of them – but I wouldn’t need it again, so I could get away with it! Firstly, I removed the battery, the DVD drive and the back panels which covered the RAM and hard drive. I removed these and stored them safely for later (aside from the battery, which was sent for recycling).
cover

Following this, the laptop was flipped over, and the keyboard removed. This was another broken part, so had to go to the great server farm in the sky.
KB removed

To ensure I reconnected everything in the right place (more of a difficulty on a laptop than for a desktop), I wrote on the connector what each connection was for before removing the plugs. In this example, this connector was for the power switch and wireless on/off switch.
connector

The screen was next to go, and with the top and bottom plastics finally separated, I could get working on the innards I needed.
Screen
scr
MB out

With everything out again, I reseated the RAM, and laid the motherboard out on a Lego baseboard, with the DVD and hard drives in situ (but not yet secured).
Image

Ensuring the power adaptor connection was in solidly was important, as a loose fitting can cause too much movement of the power cable and inevitably lead to it disconnecting at awkward moments.
Power

Slowly but surely, I added more Lego around the components to make sure that they were firmly and securely in place.
Components

I also used some 8×8 Plates with Grilles as vents over the fan, to help keep the system cool. Vents were also added over the hard disk to give it some airflow.
Vents
HDD vents

Whilst not perfectly flush, the front USB ports and DVD drive were nicely secured by nothing more than Lego bricks!
Front USB

I would have loved to make it look a bit neater, but with the time available (and the bricks I had to hand), I think it looks rather good.
Fin

The white tile acts as a power switch. Due to the original location of the power switch on the laptop, this had to go halfway along the top of the casing.
Power

VGA and S-video connections provide the means of connecting to a TV. It’s currently connected with an S-video to SCART lead, but I’ll change it over to something a bit better.
Video

For software, I chose a Linux distribution called Element, which is designed for Home Theatre PCs (HTPCs). It has a ‘ten foot user interface’, i.e. the interface is big enough to be easily seen from 10 feet away – great for watching videos from the sofa. I also installed an Android server to enable me to use any Android phone as a touchpad and keyboard, but of course, I had a standard wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it.
Element

The HTPC is a fun addition to our lounge – comes in use for watching movies from our network hard drive, or Youtube videos on the big* TV screen.

Challenge complete!

*OK, it’s 23″ – but it’s bigger than the computer screen!!

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