PDFs online at playmobil.com

[Indianna]

henry_martini is doing a wonderful job typing up inventories, but I bet he could use some help!

Thanks for the (very gentle ) reminder!  I said I would help with this effort, but I have found it difficult and confusing to figure out which sets haven't been done yet.  Is there a list somewhere that I have missed?  Meanwhile, I tried to figure out where to start by taking Henry's original list of pdfs and comparing it to all of his posts of completed lists.  Some of the sets on the completed list were not on the original list so that also makes me wonder if I am missing something. 

I will dive in head first and try to do the first one on the list, 3175.      I see it has already been done - I will find another.

As of now, and to the best of my knowledge, it looks like these are the sets still to be done:
3175
3285
3286
3761
3826
3827
4059
4438
5635
5702
5752
5762
5857
5968
6121
6149
6182
6183
6675
7324
7414
7415
7416
7423

This is a list of sets he has already done - the ones with asterisks were not on henry's original list of pdfs:
4945   *
4947   *
5368   
5371   
5560   *
5562   *
5625   
5626   
5627   
5629   *
5969   
6120   
6130   
6131   
6132   
6133   
6134   
6140   
6141   
6148   
6150   
6153   
6155   
6159   *
6162   
6163   
6164   
6165   
6166   
6167   
6168   
6169   
6173   *
6187   
6663   *
6670   *
6671   
6673   *
6677   
6684   *

[sbblabotw]

Fair question, Anne!

The links to set lists that I've posted whenever reporting "done" have just been 2015 sets, since I suppose that's what people are most interested in right now. There are lots of others that need doing, of course. And, as you've discovered, new PDFs have become available since Henry posted his first big list.

One thing I just now got around to doing, was to show in the setbox (in a page with a pictorial list of sets), different icons for when the link to playmobil.com is a PDF and when it's a link to an official list of spare parts. As of now, the icon that goes to the PDF for the set is a crossed wrench and screwdriver, like it is on the official site, and the list-of-spare-parts is a little checklist. (I thought the puzzle piece just too obscure.) See here for comparison:
PlaymoDB List - 6055,6069

6055 has only an official spare parts list (or does at the time of posting, will eventually have a PDF I suppose) and 6069, a PDF. The little rainbow by 6069 means that there are instructions for the set, and they are in colour; this also displays on older sets that have no PDF, but have scanned colour instructions. The question mark by 6055 means the instruction status is unknown.

In short: You can hover over any icon with your mouse to see what it means.

Set with instructions have the line "Parts inv'ed" in either red (incomplete) or green (complete). If that text is in brown, there are no instructions and so it's hard to say whether the set is complete or not. Not useful to the colour-blind, but not the only way to get that information.

So, if there's a list of sets you're wondering about, paste them into the form in Your Set List and have a look. The form is quite forgiving: you can paste in numbers separated by spaces, commas, with extra text in there, whatever is easy to copy from - you can even highlight a bunch of text with set numbers from the official site and paste that. You shouldn't have to mess with it much to get it to work. In groups of 40 or fewer, you can see the pictures and get all that visual information above, so you can see what's left unfinished.

Any help, Anne? Hope so! Keep asking if anything's unclear - I'm sure you're not the only one confused. I've been working with it so long that it's hard for me to see it with users' eyes, so feedback like this is helpful.

Couple of things I'm working on: a page with the full list of the almost-2000 downloadable instructions; and a way to display sets not only by theme and focus, but also by year of first release (and all sets with a year). I'll announce when they're ready.

And if you'll excuse me, I've got some inventory catch-up to do to put Henry's work into production!

[Indianna]

Thanks for the various info, Heather!  Being the rather persnickety former operations person that I am, I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to give you useful data.  I am sending you an email with an excel file for set 5559 in which I used your existing text-only inventory as a starting point to verify the parts you already had for it and to add the others shown in the PDF instructions.  In the course of doing this I had an observation as well as a few questions:

I noticed that when the text-only inventories are displayed at Playmodb, the spacing seems to be off by an extra tab (or some other character) in the header of the form.

And a few questions:
- is there a database form for each part that we should/could be using to provide you with good data?  It seems like there is a lot of information about each part beyond the basics (including many new features you have added such as German and French part names) so how can we efficiently provide/confirm this data for you?
- in the text-only inventory, is the "x" in part quantity needed? 
- should we be developing a color chart?  I know this is probably a giant project but an interesting one. 

Meanwhile, I'll try a few more inventories.   

[GrahamB]

a color chart

Oh yes please! Magenta, dark pink, even red, who can tell?

[sbblabotw]

Oh yes please! Magenta, dark pink, even red, who can tell?

Anne, you're doing great, I'm replying to you in depth but wanted to get this out.

I actually have interesting news about colours. First, seemingly unrelated, is that playmobil.es has the spare-parts function, and so there are now, coming online in increasing numbers, Spanish names for parts. (I'll have those in the db, in the same place as German and French, very soon - the scraper scripts are still rolling.) This sounds unimportant to anyone but Spanish speakers EXCEPT that a great percentage of the Spanish names have a three-digit number tacked on the end - and from what I've looked at so far, that number is highly correlated to colour! Parts detectives may have noticed some colours showing up in "official" English and French names, which is sometimes helpful but harder to search for (e.g. "red", sigh. ).  But three digits at the end of a name is pretty distinctive. I'm working on a way to isolate them, so as to figure out more clearly what numbers correspond to what colours, so we can fill in colours for "orphan" parts with no picture or set assignment - and so maybe figure out where they go. I'll have some examples to show in a while.

Besides all that, there are dozens of parts with pictures but no colour - I just haven't gotten around to assigning them. Anyone want to take a page of the TO BE ASSIGNED category, sorted by colour and type me up a batch of colours? Your best guess as to magenta vs. dark pink is better than nothing.

[Tiermann]

At the Speyer show there were color chips in a display case. They had a bunch of them in sheets on the wall and you can see the sticker on each. Colors have a code 000 000 00 format, so perhaps these numbers from Spain refer to the first three digits? We just need to match the part and that number up with one of the color swatches and if it works we will know. The second set of numbers appears to indicate the type of plastic used. I put a couple of photos of these online at my Flickr account

Speyer Playmobil Tour no237 by TimSpfd, on Flickr

Speyer Playmobil Tour no238 by TimSpfd, on Flickr

The other shots of the wall weren't as clear but much of the data can be figured out. Just for fun I will go ahead and compile a list of the shown colors with the first three numbers, the German name and an English translation. We can hope it will correspond to those numbers from Spain.

[Indianna]

. . . Parts detectives may have noticed . . .

OK, I definitely want to be a parts detective!  We can have badges and dark glasses or maybe just the old reliable magnifying glass and deerstalker cap - either way, I am IN!   


Tim, I remember when you posted those color chip photos last year - I was positively drooling - at least until you went on to say this:

Yes, I have decent enough shots of the exposed chips to get numbers/names for them all. We were told at the factory that they use 4000 different combinations of the plastic beads for colors these days. So this display would just be the tip of the iceberg.

   

so we may have quite a task ahead of us.   

[Tiermann]

I've sent a spreadsheet of the chip info to Heather. There were 121 colors with numbers on them ranging from 000 to 274
If anyone else wants a copy PM me.

[sbblabotw]

Looks like we've hit the jackpot - to some extent, anyway. From a quick lookover, the three digits in the Spanish names do indeed correspond to these chip colours. I've loaded the data I have into PlaymoDB and made it searchable. Try PlaymoDB Parts Containing "104" (in Spanish) as an example. Three-character searches are normally too short, but if they're all digits and in Spanish, I fixed it to let them through.

Next project: to find parts with no colour data or picture in PlaymoDB and determine the colour based on the 3-digit code. They won't all be correct (e.g. 30 29 0130, ASA ZODIAC 104, is grey) but I think it'll be a help. We can also standardize all those green, light green, yellow-green, dusty green, dark green.... entries too.

[sbblabotw]

Three-digit codes in the DB (as of today) are as follows:
010, 020, 022, 023, 024, 025, 027, 028, 030, 031, 040, 041, 044, 045, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 060, 061, 070, 081, 090, 091, 092, 094, 095, 097, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 170, 180, 181, 190, 191, 201, 202, 207, 220, 221, 223, 225, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 248, 252, 256, 271, 305, 385, 536, 934

Whee!