[HN Gopher] The Free Universal Construction Kit
___________________________________________________________________
The Free Universal Construction Kit
Author : robinhouston
Score : 345 points
Date : 2026-04-22 07:20 UTC (4 days ago)
HTML web link (fffff.at)
TEXT w3m dump (fffff.at)
| culi wrote:
| That's an awesome project. I'm sure there are many kids that have
| been gifted LEGO knockoffs that are not compatible with legos
| from adults that didn't know any better. A similar "interop"
| project for those would be great
| bombcar wrote:
| Almost all (back then, I hear the clone quality is much higher
| now) were "compatible" but had little to no clutch power, a
| wall built with some of them would inevitably break at the
| clone bricks.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Crappy tolerance in the clone parts. I hear the clones got
| much better now.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| When I was a kid I used to rate my uncles and aunts based off who
| got me Legos or Megablocks.
|
| Idk how I'd feel if they got me this.
| andai wrote:
| I was so confused recently, when I bought a toy car kit from
| some German brand which cost 25 euro and came with the pieces
| all joined together straight from the injection mold, so you
| had to twist them off one by one, and then the little injection
| spikes stabbed your fingers while you worked.
|
| Bought an almost equivalent set from Lego (stab-free!) for 9
| euro. How does that pricing make sense haha
| sdwr wrote:
| Economy of scale, Lego can invest the billions(?) in machines
| and molds that don't leave connection points (?), partially
| by reusing pieces between sets.
| orsorna wrote:
| With such kits you are generally supposed to remove the parts
| from the runners with nippers and then sand those nubs down.
| flobosg wrote:
| (2012)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| FUCK yeah.
| cortesoft wrote:
| No Construx? I built everything out of those as a kid.
| wisemanwillhear wrote:
| Ditto. My kids are still pretty young, and my old Construx are
| one of the favorite building toys.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Neat idea, but as an adult who builds little machines out of Lego
| Technic for fun sometimes, the adapter selection seems very
| limited. In order to make this idea "practical" you would need
| adapters with a variety of sizes, shapes, and orientations. I
| guess I'm not the target audience - I can definitely see this
| being cool for children.
| mathgeek wrote:
| That's the joy of 3d printing. You can adapt these to any
| adapter if you need it.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I feel like the only way to summon the corporate lawyers faster
| would be to put a Mickey mouse on the box.
| jadamson wrote:
| If you go to the homepage (or look at the banner) the project
| is shut down since 2015.
|
| https://fffff.at/rip/
| Rygian wrote:
| Mickey mouse is in the public domain, at last!
| LPisGood wrote:
| I think they would have a very strong case that using the
| mouse on a product is likely to confuse consumers about the
| origin of the product and therefore infringe on their
| trademark.
| wavemode wrote:
| Nah, Disney seems to be genuinely letting it go. Amazon and
| other sites are flooded with Steamboat Willie merchandise
| at this point.
|
| In fact I play cornhole competitively, and last year I
| picked up a set of Steamboat Willie themed bags:
|
| https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-
| colo...
| srean wrote:
| Any zometool aficionados here
|
| https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/zometool.html
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Zometool rules!
|
| I run workshops about the use of modular systems in
| facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I
| did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool.
| It was a blast and really successful.
|
| In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve
| Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously
| look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past
| 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.
|
| The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the
| conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done
| other little collaborative build projects since, so one day
| I'll document them all together.
| srean wrote:
| Fantastic ! Would love to read more about your experiences.
| analog8374 wrote:
| yeah I dig it a fair bit. It's good for making jigs for
| carpenting geometric stuff. Those funny angles.
| adkaplan wrote:
| This kit is how I discovered zometool ten years ago and still
| find it fascinating. Its amazing! Check out vZome and its
| associated discord. FOSS virtualzome builder and symmetry study
| tool.
| srean wrote:
| Thanks a bunch. I did not know about vZome. Thanks for the
| introduction.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Any George Hart aficionados around..?
| srean wrote:
| For the longest time I did not know that Vi was his daughter.
| shagie wrote:
| Back many years ago, yes... and I recently stumbled across it
| again in a Henry Segerman video about expanding racks in three
| dimensions https://youtu.be/NEJZlGuWGV8
| datawars wrote:
| Very cool. Do two copyright infringements (one on each side of
| the adapter) cancel each other out? I really like it!
| croes wrote:
| At least Lego's patent on the bricks expired. You can't make
| mini figures but bricks shouldn't be a problem
| sixtyj wrote:
| Well done indeed
|
| I hope that Lego (not lawyers ofc) would appreciate such
| creativity approach and hire creators. (E.g. similar to
| acquihire of OpenClaw creator by OpenAI.)
|
| How many of us do think this way?
|
| I am always jealous (in good way) when I see similar
| projects.
| stackghost wrote:
| Indeed Amazon is chock full of shitty Chinese Lego ripoffs.
| The bricks do indeed fit together but the quality is abysmal.
| pennomi wrote:
| Some of the Chinese brands have superior quality to LEGO
| these days.
| touggourt wrote:
| Partly because the chinese produce the plastic that Lego
| use.
| Rexxar wrote:
| There is some interoperability provision to patents and
| copyright in European union if I remember correctly but I don't
| know how broad they are and if they apply to this.
| delichon wrote:
| These kits can have extraordinary longevity. I was playing with
| Lincoln Logs in 1967. Turns out they got started in 1918. Lego
| bricks have been around since 1945. The moat created by seriously
| delighting your customers at a young age is large.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Don't forget Erector Sets.
|
| I spend untold hours failing to build a cable tramway between
| my mother's dresser and bed.
|
| But at least now I'm an expert at pylon design!
| lostlogin wrote:
| > The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a
| young age is large.
|
| I wish Meccano would get its shit together. I can't see
| anything I want on their limited site and there is so much cool
| stuff that could be made.
|
| https://www.meccano.com/
| touggourt wrote:
| You may found them on the Eitech website. It is a german
| compatible brand. https://www.eitech.de/en
| rapnie wrote:
| It is a really nice concept. I had never heard of it. But then
| as GenX at young age I played with Fishertechnik [0] more than
| with Lego. Around since 1966 [1].
|
| [0] https://www.fischertechnik.de/en
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Construx is what I played with. It was only sold for a few
| years.
| shagie wrote:
| I'd love to play with fischertechnik again...
|
| https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/industry-and-universities --
| Factorio on a shelf would be neat (but "request quote" tends
| to suggest its out of my price range
| https://www.studica.com/fischertechnik/fischertechnik-
| factor... )
|
| https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/maker
|
| ----
|
| I first saw fischertechnik at an engineering expo at the
| local university in the 80s. There was a terminal and you'd
| enter the type of candy you wanted, and it had a robotic
| system that got it from the shelving... which was neat. The
| backside of it had another robotic system that got a piece of
| candy from a conveyer belt (of many different ones),
| identified it, and put it in the now empty spot.
| eru wrote:
| > The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a
| young age is large.
|
| I'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell
| a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off.
|
| (Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances.
| But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far
| either.)
| estearum wrote:
| I'm sure that Lego still captures virtually all of the
| revenue in this category, no?
| eru wrote:
| Maybe, I'm not sure. Though Wikipedia demonstrates that you
| don
| eru wrote:
| that you don't need to make a lot of money to suck the
| revenue out of a sector.
| jojomodding wrote:
| Tell your kids about FUCK, the most fun way to play with them
| bricks...
| gblargg wrote:
| Do you mean leaving them on a hard floor so a parent can injure
| their heel stepping on one at night?
| kmoser wrote:
| Special high intensity training!
| nakedneuron wrote:
| SHIT.. I figured that one..
| amysox wrote:
| I was going to say something about the choice of acronym for
| the project, but, well, a couple people figured it out. :D
| lioeters wrote:
| > Note: all units are in inches.
|
| Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the
| organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Is this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print
| out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units
| could be light-years for all it matters.
| reaperducer wrote:
| There's something about the internet that makes people want
| to moan in public about nothing.
|
| Whenever I see someone in a current British television show
| use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia
| that insists that the United States is the only place in the
| world that uses imperial units.
|
| Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| Every post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people
| worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about
| it.
|
| There's no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people
| to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office.
| (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just
| this reason)
| genewitch wrote:
| up until very recently, the only units that made it even
| remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs
| Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon."
|
| Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the
| person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short
| measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou"
| pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".
|
| I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day,
| if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time,
| odd how that fits!
|
| is it _really_ so hard to have a ruler with both measurements?
| I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two
| other measurement units to _inches_ , for page layout.
|
| I'm american, from the '80s, and we never _used_ metric day-to-
| day.
|
| the US will be US customary units basically forever. because
| we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of
| thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs,
| "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.
|
| So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut
| up about this. No one cares.
| soopypoos wrote:
| I can't take seriously anyone who measures butter by volume
| genewitch wrote:
| I've been cooking for something like a quarter century, for
| multiple people, and i have never once, in my life, used a
| kitchen scale. I have one for doing METRIC measurements of
| ratios of liquids for other uses, but _not once_ for
| cooking.
|
| A stick of butter is a quarter pound. it doesn't matter
| though, because the butter is marked in "recipe
| increments". if you _melt_ it, you can use "tablespoons"
| to measure it, literally.
|
| eta: i haven't even used measuring cups or spoons for
| anything in like a decade, unless i am making bread or
| bread-like things.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > is it really so hard to have a ruler with both
| measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font
| point to two other measurement units to inches, for page
| layout.
|
| The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it
| does not form something "to build more complicated units out
| of".
|
| For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have
| "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as
| corresponding volume unit?
|
| Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion
| factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e.
| 10^-3 km = 1 m = 10 dm = 100 cm = 1000 mm = 10^6 um = 10^9 nm
| = ...
|
| vs 1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd =
| 15840 ft = ...
| genewitch wrote:
| we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain is
| because i have one, but that's specifically to measure land
| against a plat map. Every location in this country is based
| off common reference locations (there's a literal marker on
| the ground), with _only_ chains and angles to delimit
| things (generally).
|
| Read that last part again, because they use GPS to
| determine if the marker has moved, and that takes X minutes
| to quiesce. you can't take X*Y minutes to check each chain
| mark and angle.. not all land is rectilinear. we have a bit
| less than ten _million_ km^2 of land in this country.
|
| I'd reckon that maybe 1% of Americans know what a league
| is, as in the definition. Less for "furlong", less for
| "chain".
|
| This is how these conversations go, usually. It's
| completely pointless, most of the people here will never
| interface with something where this matters. I'm a few
| decades old - 2.25 score years old, to be accurate. My wife
| knows what a score is, and how many feet in a mile, which i
| can never remember; by the by, it's about 5300 feet.
|
| like Celsius, the metric measurements don't "mean" anything
| _directly_ to a human. a meter is how fast light travels in
| 1 /speedoflightinmeterspersecond. water boils at 100 and
| freezes at 0. compare to ~100F "roughly median body
| temperature", "roughly the length of an adult foot", and
| "roughly the length of the middle bone in your thumb".
|
| yes, for "science" using units that convert is great, one
| of my favorite things to read is the Frink language unit
| file for that reason. Metric is _cute_ and ostensibly
| "well-defined". great, use it.
|
| you're not getting ~400,000,000 people to switch,
| potentially ever. The sheer cost is astronomical. a speed
| limit sign, _just the sign_ is ~$22. The total cost of
| install could be from $500 to $3000. Per speed limit sign.
| There 's at _least_ 10,000 speed limit signs _on
| interstates alone_. [nearly] Every single mile of every
| single highway and interstate in the US has a reflective
| sign stating what mile it is - except for mile 420, i 'm
| not sure why, that'll be missing but there will be a 419.7
| mile marker. weird.
|
| > In 2002, a contractor installed just over 50 miles' worth
| of markers on I-78 and Routes 22 and 33 at a cost of
| $230,000, or about $4,500 per mile. Today, [...] $6,500 per
| mile, said PennDOT spokesman Ron Young.
|
| and
|
| > As of 2022, [...] the Interstate Highway System, which
| has a total length of 48,890 miles (78,680 km)
|
| and that's just _interstates_. We have expressways,
| freeways, spurs, feeders, highways, state roads that use
| mile markers. Speed limit signs vary in distance, but
| figure 2 miles per (raelly 1 per mile since they 're on
| both directions of travel, and usually there's 2 per
| direction, one on either shoulder) on nearly every commute
| surface. we have ~2,600,000 miles of paved roads, and a bit
| over 4,000,000 miles of roads, total, in the US - that's
| 6.437376e+6 kilometers, or 21 lightseconds in a vacuum, or
| 32 lightseconds in fiber optic cable. 32000ms ping,
| awesome.
|
| Every house in the US is built with 16" on-center framing
| for the walls. we're not going to switch to "406.4mm on
| center", because our sheetrock, plywood, etc are all
| 48"x96".
|
| every other country that switched did it 70+ years ago, has
| less people, or is _drastically_ smaller.
|
| like i said, rudely, but now politely, give it up, we're
| staying with our US customary units.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain
| is because i have one, but that's specifically to measure
| land against a plat map. Every location in this country
| is based off common reference locations (there's a
| literal marker on the ground)
|
| The same holds for more obscure unit prefixes in the SI
| system like dam (decameter) or hm (hectometer) in the SI
| unit system (as far as I am aware, the only common usage
| of the "deca" prefix is in Austria for "decagram" (dag)).
|
| Nevertheless, even these obscure units fit the regular
| pattern perfectly:
|
| 1 km = 10 hm = 100 dam = 1000 m
|
| - and this was my point.
| genewitch wrote:
| I forgot one thing. you said "why not hav in^2 and in^3"
| we do, but we don't use that very often. Older American
| "muscle cars" engines' displacement was measured in cubic
| inches. every child learns what a square inch is. a
| "board foot" is 12 cubic inches of milled wood, 12 in^3 -
| I don't know how to verify this on a Sunday, so this may
| be wrong, the board-foot. And then, we use square feet;
| for floor space in a house, say, my house is ~1500 ft^2.
| We also use cubic yards, yd^3, for stuff like dirt,
| concrete. when talking about this, like if i need a
| driveway's worth of concrete, the load is measured in
| "yards" which is short for "cubic yards."
|
| But all that aside, and with apologies to mods and you
| for sneering; i wanted to say this in my prior reply but
| when reading it aloud to my wife i took it out:
|
| Americans can, in general, divide and multiply by numbers
| other than 10.
|
| yes, we use acres and hectares, too! it sounds better to
| say i live on 6.5 acres to an American neighbor who asks,
| than 0.02630457km^2...
| timcobb wrote:
| There's this universal constant 2.54 you can use it to divide
| any value in inches and badabing you get the value in
| centimeters
| tanvach wrote:
| Super cool, lock-in is very real. We are overflowing with Duplo
| and Lego sets because I just don't want to deal with another
| system. There are, of course, other models on Thingiverse,
| Printables, etc., but knowing these are properly designed to fit
| and work is a huge plus. Cudos to the team!
| tripdout wrote:
| Wow, Tinkertoys, I still remember how the wood smelled and the
| big drum it came in.
| lucb1e wrote:
| In case the authors are here, the first sentence contains the
| bytes e2 80 94 which would be UTF-8 for an em dash, but it has
| been reinterpreted as 3 bytes using
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout and
| shown on the page as aEUR". Further down, there's a lot of
| similar errors such as a single right quote (U+2019) in K'nex.
| Firefox seems to have first removed their encoding configuration
| menu in version 89, then introduced a new button in version 91,
| and that one is disabled now as well so there's no fixing this
| user-side it seems :/
|
| Edit: ah the page is from 2012-03-19, from the <meta
| property="article:published_time"> tag
| londons_explore wrote:
| This is probably the case of a bodged migration from one CMS to
| another.
|
| My blog suffered the same, and going through loads of old pages
| to check and fix them just isn't worth the effort.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| The archived version from 2012 is showing the characters
| correct. So probably some migration like you said.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/.
| ..
|
| The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to
| the front page.
|
| https://fffff.at/
|
| Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird
| characters show up.
|
| But which was showing the characters the way it should on
| August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/
|
| Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the
| site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of
| the site and in the process of doing so things got a little
| screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the
| different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with
| MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
| flashdesk wrote:
| Yeah this really looks like an encoding issue during
| migration.
|
| I've run into similar problems when moving old content
| between systems, especially with MySQL and mixed encodings.
| It can get messy surprisingly quickly.
| taneq wrote:
| > Why shouldnaEUR(tm)t we be able to?
|
| I have no idea why but my brain immediately interpreted this as
| a Scottish accent, like 'shouldnae'. Weird.
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| ... because "aEUR" and "ae" are visually similar?
| rmunn wrote:
| I was just mentioning the Japanese word _mojibake_ on the
| plain-text thread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897681), and here you
| give an example. In fact, UTF-8 misinterpreted as Windows-1252
| is the mojibake I personally encounter most often. Curly quotes
| (most often a right apostrophe inside a word like can't or it's
| or didn't) are the most common ones, with em dashes being only
| slightly less common. The other direction (Windows-1252 text
| being read as UTF-8) produces (U+FFFD) everywhere instead, but
| either way, I still see those from time to time today. But far,
| FAR less frequently than I used to back in the late 2000's or
| early 2010's. I used to see aEUR" and similar sequences all the
| time 15-20 years ago, and now it's rare enough that I actually
| notice when it happens.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I'm disappointed this wasn't a joke about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_property
| AstroJetson wrote:
| I'm disappointed that VEX IQ didn't make the list of connections.
| For a System they have a lot of well thought out parts, they need
| help on the decoration side and smaller gear patterns.
| skyberrys wrote:
| The idea send wild, it reminds me of the katamari video game
| where you roll up assorted stuff.
| hjkl0 wrote:
| This thing is from 2012. It's a set of printable models for toy
| parts that allow interconnecting with a bunch of different
| construction toys, like Lego and K'nex.
|
| I remember thinking this was pretty subversive and cool back
| then. My own experience in 3D printing since that time has taught
| me that there is no way that these parts can ever be printed
| accurately enough to actually work. It didn't get much traction
| on the Thingiverse files either.
| IanCal wrote:
| You can definitely print Lego pieces that work, I've got some.
| dackdel wrote:
| I did not expect to wake up to se fffffat on hn. God i miss them
| all so much.
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(page generated 2026-04-26 15:00 UTC)