The dark side of the brick

Final post of the day... lots to catch up on, it seems.  Next off the shelf is the Droid Commander set from 2019.  I eagerly purchased this straight off as the concept looked really interesting and I was keen to see how it actually worked out in practice. What you get is enough bricks to build three droids: a really nicely detailed R2-D2, a pretty good Teal gonk droid and an afterthought of an imperial mouse droid.  Plus a number of random parts to build into targets and implements.  And a single control unit that you have to swap between droids. No instructions, though: they come with the app.  Which is where I started to get a bit bogged down.  I'm generally a pretty fast builder and the app wanted me to do one piece at a time before I could move to the next.  I spent the whole time pressing the "next" button which was pretty frustrating. You can also only build the R2 unit first and have to leave the rest of the parts bagged up until you've passed e...

I managed to find time for a second build this evening which was fewer bricks than I expected... the mindstorms "droid developer" ( 9748 ) from way back in 1999.  This must have been one of the very first Star Wars tie-ins for Lego.   I have to say that this was a complete surprise to me when I found it while browsing Rebrickable and I had missed this and its bad twin from my list of Lego Star Wars.  So I got hunting on Ebay and picked up this very much second hand set.  There are a number of quite rare parts in here, including the technic R2 head pieces.  However, at the heart of it, is a mindstorms control block, which unfortunately is a bit temperamental so I've not been able to get it to do much more than beep a bit.   I've only built the R2 model but the book has two more builds in it - remembering back to my 1990s Lego technic, this was pretty common with multiple builds documented with the one set of bricks.  Here's a photo: I've got l...