Building your own drone is a common enough pursuit among Hackaday readers. There are quite a few LEGO enthusiasts around, too. A company named Flybrix wants to marry those two pursuits and is offering a kit that allows you to build your drone out of LEGO bricks.
The company isn’t affiliated with LEGO. The kits look like they have some pretty common motors and control hardware. There are a few custom pieces, but the real key appears to be a LEGO compatible mount for the motors. You can see a video about the kit, below.
Naturally, this being Hackaday, we couldn’t help but notice you could by the parts cheaper than the kits (the motor arms are $10 for 8 and you can get a set of replacement bricks for $16. It would be pretty easy to use these as a basis for building your own drone without all of their parts. What’s more, if you have a 3D Printer, you could surely print your own motor mounts and get in on the action. There are plenty of LEGO-compatible bricks on Thingiverse, for example, that could be quickly modified.
Flybrix isn’t the only game in town. We’ve seen similar kits from Brick Drones, and a few on Instructables as well (including one with a GoPro camera).
Since we usually have to rebuild our drones, there’s a certain appeal to having one made out of LEGO bricks. We’ve seen moving LEGO creations before, but can’t recall one that flies. If you are looking for your own control system, maybe you can use a Pi Zero.
More about the background of the story:
http://embedded.fm/episodes/157
Use plenty Kragl
The flight in the video looks pretty fake. The other mentioned have heavy motors or are light weight.
I want a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYk9q9UBnmg
Someone has actually hired me to design a lego drone kit, with some added gameplay elements to make it more fun. In the Flybrix videos, it looks like they only stay airborne for a few seconds before crashing, though I haven’t gotten to play with one yet.
do they make lego bricks out of a lower density/more lightweight material? i mean sure you can make anything fly if you put enough power into it, but you’ll get more range with lighter materials.
“you could by the parts cheaper” how about “buy”
What if he wanted to come by the parts cheaper?