For most of our team everything started from an extracurricular academy teaching LEGO robotics. Back in those days there was this great website – http://www.nxtprograms.com/ (Actually it is still working until this day!) with tens of free building instructions for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT set. The instructions are simply photos of each step put on a single infinite scroll web page:
There were lots of times when the students complained about not being sure where a given part goes. What’s even worse, often students got to the last step when they figure out that they have misplaced some of the parts. Well, that was way back in 2010, when there wasn’t really a better way to show LEGO instructions on the web, so we worked with what we have got. However, more than 10 years later things have changed.
Let’s take LEGO itself as an example. Back then, when NXT was their top education set the instructions looked like this:
Fast forward 15 years – they have moved to these shiny, interactive 3D instructions available on their app. In their own words “Building goes digital”. Now they offer most of their instructions as “interactive guides for smooth building”.
I understand that probably not everyone has the resources that the LEGO Group has, but there is no need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing your own app. You can bring all of your instructions into the new decade with BuildIn3D, starting at 9 USD/month.
If you are not yet convinced, here is an NXT construction in 3D for you to play with:
Competition Robot from LEGO MIndstorms NXT in 3D instructions