Lego exoskeleton maker seeks your votes for official kit-status

Legoist Peter sez, "My most popular model, the Exo Suit, has been submitted to the LEGO CUUSOO website. I need 10,000 supporters for the chance to have it released as an official LEGO set. If you'd like to see this model made available to buy, please support my project on the CUUSOO site."

LEGO CUUSOO | Exo Suit (Thanks, Peter!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Joshua Ochs

Perhaps I’m just not familiar enough with this plan, but a lot of those look like large custom pieces designed for this set. Legos lost a lot of their charm for me when they started using those single-use large chunks rather than inventively using tons of tiny pieces. Lots of generic pieces meant you could also come up with your own inventive uses, and new sets were more inspiration and part supply than “you will use it this way”. This started to change dramatically in the late nineties and especially with the movie tie-in sets. Those claws, for instance, will always be those claws and nothing else.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I’d take classic Space, Castle, and even Town any day over the sets from the last 15-20 years.
- Andrew Singleton
  
  Trueth. However it is a sweet bit of kit.
  
  It just doesn’t use the classic lego ‘our bricks, your imagination, anything goes’ mindset.
  - BrianOman
    
    Except, that’s exactly what it does. Their bricks, this guys imagination, anything goes.
    Honestly, those claws are only those claws if you don’t have the imagination to make them into something else.
    - http://twitter.com/frederikvdz Frederik
      
      Yup, look at the steampunk dino posted a few days ago.
      http://boingboing.net/2012/04/08/steampunk-lego-dino-with-a-ba.html
      Allot of what you would think were purely pirate parts, used totally differently.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/VNTTBNVPN7HMRJLO6GIJZVMVSU Bram
  
  I doubt this model has a single piece bigger that a 2×2 brick. It’s built up out of lots of little tiny detail pieces that can be re-purposed for plenty of other creations. I can see at least 12 pieces in each claw…they can definitely become something else.
- Timothy Gould
  
  Sorry mate but you’re more showing your ignorance than your age. As the poster below points out that’s made of hundreds of tiny parts, very few of which are designed for robots of any size (the claws alone have 12 pieces each including fingers made from the arms of small robots).
- Hanglyman
  
  I agree and have been saying the exact same thing for years (heck, I don’t even like that they gave the Minifigs expressions other than the basic blank smile), but I don’t think it applies in this case. Granted, the claws do look a little weird, but the rest of it appears to be just a very clever use of lots of small basic parts, many of which can be seen and identified if you look closely enough.
- princessalex
  
  I recognize dozens of individual parts on this kit from others my boys have bought and built. And, taken apart and turned into something else. Again and again and again . . . The place I recognize those claws from is Jaba’s Sail Barge kit, being used as the internal parts of the Pit of Carkoon.
  
  My boys (ages 9 and 11) were quite impressed when they saw this. And, they recognized parts from MANY kits . . . including ExoForce and Lego Technics, among others.
  
  The point is, this kit IS made from hundreds of individual parts. It’s just that the parts have been getting more technical over the years. Not everything someone wants to make can be made with brick-shaped pieces, after all.
- conversational
  
  I used to feel disappointed that Lego moved out into so many areas that weren’t Space, Castle and Town, but actually it has brought a much larger fan base and more innovation in pieces and colors. There is still a very active City fan base as well. There are postings on Cuusoo such as this City Vehicle Transport Semi that, although not as professional of a picture, appears to be fully articulated and designed to fit into the City style.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=688945082 Joe Seatter
  
  The biggest pieces I can see are the round 2×2 domes and the disks near the end of each arm. I agree with you about the newer sets having a lot of large custom pieces that are hard to repurpose and take a lot of the imagination out of the toy, but this is the opposite of that. Yes, many of the pieces come from the newer sets (like the claw tips), but they’re all tiny and at least in the spirit of the older sets, where you got a lot of small pieces that didn’t have any really defined purpose, and make what you wanted out of them.
- Mike Hatton
  
  @Joshua Ochs - Haha, it’s funny because he’s using robot arms with teeth in them to make claws and you are complaining that a claw part is just a claw… The irony truly is delicious.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Anuj-Chitale/100000619489727 Anuj Chitale
  
  Nothing can beat the classic themes. But one area in which the new is better than the old is Technic. Stud less Technic makes it possible for much compact models & greater functionality.
historydenier

edit: This should be a reply to Joshua Ochs

I had this same attitude until I started buying Lego sets for my son. Lego is still a blast and the sets we’ve bought have been mostly made up of ambiguous parts that are easy to re-purpose.

Mostly, we have stuck to City, Star Wars, Ninjago, and Kingdoms. Ninjago is by far the worst in this regard (though it is mostly about getting the sweet Ninja figures, I think), and City by far the best.

And remember, those castle walls could only be castle walls and nothing else. You know what they could use, though? Some wicked spikes. I think that Ninjago dragon we got had some of these claws. Hmmm…
http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

I’d rather see a Barbie / Ripley operating it.
- Brainspore
  
  I’d rather see a Barbie / Ripley operating it.
  
  “GET AWAY FROM MY WARDROBE, YOU B*TCH!”
Gutierrez

I just want to make a plug of another awesome Cuusoo project. A motorized walking and rolling Tachikoma. You can waste a good deal of time browsing the projects and seeing the amazing designs people come up with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dargOslomMA
- enthusiasticpoutine
  
  Reddit pointed out the Tachikoma a couple of days ago. I would heartily endorse it, but it most likely would slam into licensing issues.
- http://www.facebook.com/theodore.lane Theodore Heathe Lane
  
  I was about to post that D;
  
  lol at least I’m not the only one :)
- robdobbs
  
  I came to post this link. It got my vote.
marukosu

I sure hope LEGO isn’t planning big things for this Cuusoo project in Japan. The name basically means “shiiit” in Japanese.
- PeerKreuger
  
  Cuusoo is actually a Japanese initiative. Funny how you think you know Japanese better than the, er, Japanese.
Mister44

I love it – but it might be a bit too war-like for LEGO. Maybe put a pick ax in it’s hand so it is a mining suit.
- SamSam
  
  Um… You never saw the castles with knights? The pirates? The spaceships with lasers?
  - Mister44
    
    I’m being sarcastic because of the rather hypocritical email supposedly sent to someone from Lego in response to that new LEGO book a kid wrote on how to make Lego guns.
    - SamSam
      
      Ah. I missed that, I guess.
ridestowe

i thought for sure most of those images were cg renders, but turns out it’s just an excellent photographer with a great studio setup, and a very clean lego model.

you have my vote
spejic

Looks nice. I bet the instructions would be hell.
http://www.facebook.com/rick.barkhouse Rick Barkhouse

Love the little grey minifig hands embedded in the feet :)

Full size pic : http://www.flickr.com/photos/legoloverman/6877342842/sizes/o/in/photostream/
http://twitter.com/warrenelsmore Warren Elsmore

And if you’d like to see the real thing – Peter (along with 100 other LEGO artists) is showing this as well as many of his other amazing creations at The LEGO Show this coming May holiday. More details at http://www.thelegoshow.com !
http://avarana.blogspot.com MarlboroTestMonkey7

Beautiful
sweetcraspy

It’s worth noting that the CUUSOO terms and conditions are pretty bad for the creators. The creator explicitly assigns LEGO all of the IP rights for anything a submitted, even if they don’t manufacture it. They can copy elements or make derivative works without crediting the creator. They do license the creators to use the designs on a personal level, but that’s all.
- http://twitter.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman
  
  I do not believe that anyone submits MOCs or projects to CUUSOO thinking they’re going to get rich. I think they do it because they think their design is awesome and hope that others do as well so that LEGO will make it and sell it and that others will get to make “their” project. At worse, it’s a chance to show it off a bit and at best, it’ll get made and maybe they can even parlay it into becoming a Certified Professional or perhaps getting a chance to promote their side-business selling sets/LEGO bricks and/or to start selling sets/pieces full-time.
  
  While many might see the latter – selling sets/bricks – as something “for profit” - I suspect it is more along the lines of “enough money to buy more LEGO sets.”
  - sweetcraspy
    
    Fair enough, it’s just something to be aware of. If a creator has a characteristic style or an established fiction around their creations, they should be careful about what they give LEGO for free.
    - http://twitter.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman
      
      I agree with you, although my default assumption when putting data online – unless it is on my own server – is that Facebook, Google, LEGO, now think they own it and can sell it or do whatever they want with it. I consider this before posting stuff.
http://sheephound.tumblr.com/ Malachi Wolfe

If it’s so worry-some to give LEGO your ideas for free, why not just create a PDF kit guide? Listing which pieces are kit dependent, which kits to get them from, and links to LEGO’s site where you can buy parts in bulk (Does LEGO still offer this?)? This would cut down on the production of very specialized kits (getting a kit already in production just so you can get that rare piece for your robot gives you *everything else* in the kit, after all, and extras to boot). Granted, it’s always every person’s dream to have one of their ideas made into an actual LEGO set, but let’s leave the merchandise worship out of the equation- because, if we don’t, I start to think about when people will start creating kit diagrams that have embedded 3D drawings of each piece so you can just print the ones you don’t have down at the local make shop (like I can do in seattle. yay local make shop.). Sorry. Just that BoingBoing loves the make crowd so much, I’m surprised I don’t see more pushes in that direction. I, for one, would love to tell my kid “You want new legos? There’s some recycling out back. Melt down one of the milk cartons, bring it to the make shop and print it your own damn self.”