Lego Dataset Explorer

Coursera - DDP Project

Stefan Papp

Logo Set Explorer

The Lego Set Explorer is an app that visualizes LEGO Sets and its configurations. The collection consists of sets created from the beginning of production until 2016.

The dataset has been received from Rebrickable.com. It contains the basic information of each set (set id, year, number of pieces, theme, set name). There are more files on that web page, such as details on the pieces of the sets or colors. For this demo, we used only the sets.

Data Source: http://rebrickable.com/downloads.

In the following pages, we focus on the shiny specific features of the app.

Shiny Outline

To display the LegoSet Explorer have split it into two areas:

  • left: filtering
  • right: display in tabpane.

The tabpane itself consists of

  • a data table to display all lego set items
  • a panel that contains five plots

The plots are:

  • setsByYear
  • themesByYear
  • piecesByYear
  • piecesByYearAvg
  • piecesByThemeAvg

UI: TabPanels

The heart of the UI is a display of the data set and the plots in TabPanels.

tabPanel(p(icon("table"), "Dataset"),
    dataTableOutput(outputId="dTable")
), 

tabPanel(p(icon("line-chart"), "Data Visualization"),
     h4('Number of Sets by Year', align = "center"),
     h5('Hover over each point for Year and Total Number of Sets.', align ="center"),
     showOutput("setsByYear", "nvd3"),
     h4('Number of Themes by Year', align = "center"),
     h5('Hover over each bar for Year and Total Number of Themes.', align ="center"),
)

Future consideration

It makes sense to extend the whole explorer app with additional information such as

  • pieces
  • colors
  • etc.

It makes also sense to add more data engineering.

One option is to automatically download and extract new data.

Right now, we are using the default csv loader. There are faster options available that come with a less rich function set. So it makes sense to evaluate alternative csv loaders.