This was a purchase during an earlier road trip this year (flew to Vegas, drove through St George, Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon dam, Hoover Dam, Red Rock Canyon, Vegas). There were a number of animal themed sets at the Grand Canyon gift shop and this Roadrunner stood out. These “mini building blocks” are nanoblock compatible (look like LEGO bricks but 1/12th the size).

There are many parks that sell these sets now, some have special park exclusive sets and some are more generic (animals, park rangers, volcanos, etc) and can be bought in multiple places. I’ve started a collection on our travels through National Parks and Monuments as I’ve realized some are just really good designs and are hard to find. I slightly regret not recognizing that sooner and missed out on getting a Thor’s Hammer set from Bryce Canyon (though I did get Hoover Dam).

The distributor is Impact Photography, and they manufacture and distribute a broad variety of knick knacks and souvenirs for sale in the Parks and other gift shops. Think playing cards with scenic pictures on the back, or refrigerator magnets. Unfortunately their web site www.impactphotography.com is mostly useless when you are looking to buy more of their product, and their Amazon store is severely limited in selection. I managed to pick up 4 sets from the www.eparks.com store when they had a free shipping sale, but again details and selection are limited. So the point is, if you happen to be in a National Park and see one of these sets you like, buy it because you likely won’t find it elsewhere.

Quick breakdown of some numbers on the Roadrunner set:

• 291 pieces
• 99 extra pieces in my box
• Assembled size: 7 x 3 1/8 x 4 1/2 inches (according to box)
• $10.00 sticker price

LEGO started packing extra copies of some of their smallest pieces in sets years ago. When you think about it, the cost of including a spare 1×1 round plate in every box is much less than having support calls from frustrated parents when that one little piece is missing from a set (which LEGO Group is actually really nice about replacing). Nanoblock does the same thing in their sets, but as all of their parts are small and easy to loose, Kawada (makers of nanoblock) took the approach of including 1, 3, or even 5 extras of each piece in their nanoblock sets. The Chinese companies that make nanoblock compatible sets (available in mall stalls and on Ebay) have followed suit, but with the typical quality control issues you would expect in a cheaper set the motivation seems to be to cover for the mismanufactured parts (I have examples of those for another post). As Impact seems to be just repackaging the mini blocks from a Chinese supplier (I suspect LNO), they have done the same. The result is that for my 261 piece Roadrunner set I got 99 extra pieces. That is about 138% of the pieces needed to build the set according to the instructions.

I really like the scupt of this set. You can feel the motion of the bird. The size is great to allow detail and shaping. It is instantly recognizable, and eye catching on a shelf.

So, how does this relate to computer science? 🙂 Well, I can draw comparisons to a number of things. There are parallels to digital imaging and 3D design. There are customer support stories that can be told. But I’ll save those for another post and just say a bit about quality control.

The LNO line seems to match these souvenir sets in quality, and I would not be surprised if they are from the same factory. There are 4 issues I’ve seen with the quality – too much plastic, too little plastic, the mold being misaligned, and warping.  This set wasn’t bad, and the two issues I saw were a few pieces where the walls of the brick were wider on one side than the other, which indicates the two halves of the mold were not aligned when injected, and the base plates being warped. You might be able to see from the pictures that the two baselates curl up and don’t sit flat. These problems dont keep me from enjoying the set, but do pose some problems. While building I had to look closely at some pieces and where possible rotate them so thicker wall on one piece would be paired with thinner wall on the next. Thick next to thick would make the second piece nearly impossible to put in place.

In computer science we do a lot of work to try to achieve quality software. We write unit tests to help in development. We have automated gate tests that check code when it is committed to source code control to again run checks. And then we do manual and functional tests to put more eyes on the product. And yet we still find that when the product goes to customers they will find problems. Like in these building sets, where I am sure someone sorted through the pieces looking for defects but still missed some. So the result in both cases is that quality assurance is done, but a balance is struck between the cost of testing (time and dollars) and what is acceptable to the customer (good enough) and the need to deliver. Such is life.

UPDATE (Oct 28, 2021): We moved around Labor Day this year. I packed up a whole lot of LEGO and nanoblock sets, but this one was on display in my office and I didn’t get to packing it myself. The movers tossed it in a box with a bunch of other stuff, and as you can imagine it got broken. The tail feathers fell off, the legs came out, the base split into two, and the beak fell off. I put it back together based on the picture in this post, but found that somewhere two of the toes were missing. Fortunately, I did find the plastic container that I kept the spare parts in and found two 1×4 rounded edge pieces to replace the toes. Now this is one of the first sets back on display in my new office. 🙂