PowerShell Brickset Module – Part 2: Downloading Instructions

Update 18/01/2021: See this post for details on an updated version of this module, parts of the below may now be out of date.

---

In part 1 of this series, we looked at how to get started with the Brickset module. In part 2 we’ll take a look at how to easily download sets of instructions.

It may be the case that you have lost the set of instructions for a Lego set or perhaps you have got hold of a set secondhand that didn’t have the instructions to accompany it. It’s possible to do that for an individual set via the Lego website, but with this Brickset module you can do it from the comfort of your own PowerShell session, which can be particularly handy if you need to get more than just one set of instructions.

In its simplest form you can do this for a single set :

which gives you back two URLs. The first is for part 1 of the instructions, the second for part 2 - sometimes the larger sets ship with multiple instruction books.

You could of course paste these URLs into your browser to download them, but an easier way would be this:

which will produce this in your default browser, a tab for each pdf:

This is quite handy, but you’ve still probably got to save them away manually into a folder somewhere for future reference.

Let’s take this a step futher. By using the Theme parameter of Get-BricksetSet and a native PowerShell cmdlet Start-BitsTransfer we can download the sets of instructions for an entire  Lego theme into a specified folder:

:-)