Ever wonder how they make those really detailed 3-D illustrated Lego instruction booklets? I discovered for myself last night. There's a freeware program called MLCAD, in which you choose individual 3-D modelled parts from an enormous catalogue and carefully place them in the correct position and orientation in the workspace. Slowly, painstakingly, you can build a fully 3-D Lego model.

Last night I spent at least four hours "drawing" a small portion of a sub-assembly of a Lego robot that I designed. Oddly, designing and building the robot itself only took an a fraction of that time.

Why am I doing this? I was asked to contribute to a book about building Lego Mindstorms robots, which has a bit of a cult following amongst the geek set. As it turns out, Lego is a lot less fun when you have to design and build robots on a deadline.