There’s something extremely calming and pleasing about watching a screensaver that merely bounces some kind of image around, with the DVD logo screensaver of a DVD player being a good example. The logical conclusion is thus that it would be great to replicate this screensaver in Lego, because it’d be fun and easy. That’s where [Grant Davis]’s life got flipped upside-down, as this turned out to be anything but an easy task in his chosen medium.
Things got off on a rocky start with figuring out how to make the logo bounce against the side of the ‘screen’, instead of having it merely approach before backing off. The right approach here seemed to be Lego treads as used on e.g. excavators, which give the motion that nice pause before ‘bouncing’ back in the other direction.
With that seemingly solved, most of the effort went into assembling a functional yet sturdy frame, all driven by a single Lego Technic electromotor. Along the way there were many cases of rapid self-disassembly, ultimately leading to a complete redesign using worm gears, thus requiring running the gears both ways with help from a gearbox.
Since the screensaver is supposed to run unattended, many end-stop and toggle mechanisms were tried and discarded before settling on the design that would be used for the full-sized build. Naturally, scaling up always goes smoothly, so everything got redesigned and beefed up once again, with more motors added and multiple gearbox design changes attempted after some unfortunate shredded gears.
Ultimately [Grant] got what he set out to do: the DVD logo bouncing around on a Lego ‘TV’ in a very realistic fashion, set to the noise of Lego Technic gears and motors whirring away in the background.
Thanks to [Carl Foxmarten] for the tip.
Reminds me a little bit of the Amiga demo with the bouncing ball.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyNr3yaUQA8
And I’m not an Amiga fan, even.
Also fitting (a DVD logo parody): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOtuX0jL85Y
Wholesome partner action in this. Laughing when it fails at the start, cheering him on and celebrating at the end. Here for all of it.
:)
The final result was quite polished!
Whimsical and full of hidden challenges :) Perfect project :)
Does anybody know why the bouncing DVD logo is such a persistent meme? Why is it that so many different models of DVD player had this same behavior to the point that people still recognize it, long after the DVD format itself has become obsolete?
Has it? Blu Ray and DVD with movies/TV series are still being produced.
And DVD has the advantage of being good for SD material that has no HD/UHD source to begin with.
Without DVD being available as a second choice, ugly upscaled BD releases would be the outcome.
Also, closed captions (not subtitles) may not work on HD/UHD monitors.
That’s because the data is sent over analog connection and then the TV handles it.
A bit like how analog videotext had worked.
And since both DVDs and DVD players are meant to support ordinary RF/Composite/S-Video or RGB connections,
chances are higher everything works as intended.
I’d say ghosting was a thing back then and the DVD consortium might have release some sourcecode for this screensaver to many ODM/OEM of DVD players back then. This would be a nice topic for some digital archaelogy nerd on YT