Even whimsical projects such as klust3r cannot come to exist without standing on the shoulders of giants. This page lists some big and friendly ones. Note that none of these endorse (or AFAIK are even aware of) klust3r, this site, or myself.
The Lego format provides a lovely, open-ended playground for children, as well as for those refusing to grow up. I’m especially partial to the Mindstorms and Technic themes. Lego also provides software to program the Mindstorms EV3 brick. And even though it’s not supported anymore, some beginner-level CAD software is also still up for grabs.
The ev3dev operating system puts a complete Linux-based environment on your Mindstorms EV3 brick, providing an alternative to Lego’s official ecosystem. This allows you to run programs written in any language targeting the platform, e.g. compiling C++ code using the GNU compiler collection. The ev3dev API to control the robot’s devices is accessible from C++ through Denis Demidov’s C++ language bindings for ev3dev.
LDraw is the de facto standard for Lego modeling and associated stuff. I found Roland Melkert’s LDCad to be an excellent choice for modeling. And the temperamental but serviceable LPub3D can be persuaded to produce some pretty nice building instructions. LDraw support is ubiquitous on the Interwebs, a.o. personified by
- Trevor Sandy, whose boilerplate styling helps setting up building instructions, and
- Victor di Rienzo, whose arrows in various lengths can be used to indicate part placement.
The GNU project‘s General Public License seems like a decent choice to prevent misuse (and reduce liability) when releasing software into the wild. Honorable mentions go to Creative Commons, whose CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license comes pretty close to what I wanted for my building instructions.
A Website such as this one is quickly set up and easily maintained using WordPress. I built mine on the Azuma theme, with the help from some plugins:
- Uncommon or specialized media formats such as *.ev3 files become manageable with the WP Extra File Types plugin.
- Visitors can be unobtrusively counted using the Who Hit the Page plugin.
And of course many thanks to my family, who didn’t just give me my Mindstorms, but also the inordinate amount of time required to use it.