John Baichtal - Minecraft for Makers: Minecraft in the Real World with LEGO, 3D Printing, Arduino, and More!

Copyright 2017 John Baichtal. All rights reserved.

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August 2017: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition

2017-08-26 First Release

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Make:, Maker Shed, and Maker Faire are registered trademarks of Maker Media, Inc. The Maker Media logo is a trademark of Maker Media, Inc. Minecraft for Makers and related trade dress are trademarks of Maker Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Maker Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.

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Thanks to the many makers around the world who, like me, were inspired by Minecraft to build things in real life.

John Baichtal has written or edited over a dozen books, including the award-winning Cult of LEGO (No Starch Press, 2011), LEGO hacker bible Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects (Maker Media, 2012) with Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler, as well as Robot Builder: The Beginners Guide to Building Robots (Que, 2013) and Hacking Your LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Kit (Que, 2015). John lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.

O ne of the many charms of Minecraft involves translating the real world into the computer realm. How many examples of this have we seen? There is a Minecraft Taj Mahal, Tower of London, Washington DC Capitol, and a million others ranging from famous buildings to ones childhood home.

Thanks to a simplified building system, anyone from beginners to experts can re-create these structures. Oftentimes the block-like nature of the Minecraft interface makes for awkward translations, but frequently these projects impress viewers with their faithfulness.

Ironically, many of the adorably awkward Minecraft elementsespecially the most commonplace oneshave no parallel in the real world. Finding a precise, one-meter block of granite in a forest is not something you can expect to happen very often outside of Minecraft, yet it occurs all the time in-game. There is, therefore, a delightful disconnect between the two realms that fascinates many players.

The purpose of the book is to reverse the paradigm of re-creating real-world elements in-game. Instead well take those eccentric Minecraft elements and introduce them to our world.

This book consists of nine projects that will guide you along this approach:

This wall-mounted decoration evokes a fanciful Minecraft element, an Item Frame that stores one object and displays it much like a painting. The chapter begins with a treatise on how to measure in-game objects and translate them to the real world.

The worlds favorite toy, LEGO evokes a similar feel to Minecraft because you also use blocks/bricks to re-create the real world. LEGO even offers numerous Minecraft-inspired sets, further reinforcing that point. In this chapter Ill show you how to build the classic Minecraft block using LEGO bricks.

In addition to geological elements, Minecraft includes a number of monsters like zombies and wolves, collectively known as mobs. In this chapter Ill show you how to re-create these mobs in the real world, in order to make them pieces of a chess set.

The iconic Minecraft element, the ore block has become synonymous with the game for many people. In this chapter youll build such a cube, equipped with an LED and a battery pack so that you can make it light up.