Printing Chocolate With A LEGO 3D Printer

September 26, 2015 by James Hobson 9 Comments

Some people think the future will include a 3D printer in every home. We think if LEGO started producing these as kits we’d get pretty close. Introducing the home-made LEGO 3D printer… with a chocolate extruder.

[Gosse Adema] has been working on his LEGO based 3D printer for a while now, and it’s gotten pretty good. It’s basically a repackaged Prusa i3, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. It uses real NEMA 17 steppers mounted with LEGO Technic — the Mindstorms motors just don’t quite cut it… not yet anyway.

During his build, a colleague pointed out that back in 2005 Instructables had a remix contest, which included a 3D printer made out of LEGO. The original hacker, [Saul], issued a challenge at the end of his Instructable hoping someone else would build a better chocolate LEGO 3D printer… Well it’s only been 10 years, but [Gosse] did it!

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Lego Exoskeleton Controls Pacific Rim Robot

August 9, 2015 by James Hobson 11 Comments

As hilariously outrageous as Pacific Rim was, it was still an awesome concept. Giant robot battle suits, duking it out with the aliens. Well, it looks as if it wasn’t quite as far-fetched as we first imagined. Maker [Danny Benedettelli] just released a video of his very own Lego exoskeleton suit that when worn can be used to control a desktop size Cyclops robot. You might remember [Danny] as the author of The Lego Mindstorms EV3 Library,

The Cyclops robot (also his design) was originally built four years ago using Lego Mindstorms NXT system with an Android phone running a custom app. Cyclops has been upgraded a bit for this demonstration. Now it communicates over Bluetooth with an Arduino to [Danny’s] telemetry suit.

Relatively speaking, the system is pretty simple. The Lego exoskeleton has potentiometers on each joint, which map to a degree of freedom for the robot. When one potentiometer spins, the associated robot joint mimics it. Simple, right?

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Optics Laboratory Made From LEGO

July 2, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

16A lot of engineers, scientists, builders, makers, and hackers got their start as children with LEGO. Putting those bricks together, whether following the instructions or not, really brings out the imagination. It’s not surprising that some people grow up and still use LEGO in their projects, like [Steve] who has used LEGO to build an optics lab with a laser beam splitter.

[Steve] started this project by salvaging parts from a broken computer projector. Some of the parts were scorched beyond repair, but he did find some lenses and mirrors and a mystery glass cube. It turns out that this cube is a dichroic prism which is used for combining images from the different LCD screens in the projector, but with the right LEGO bricks it can also be used for splitting a laser beam.

The cube was set on a LEGO rotating piece to demonstrate how it can split the laser at certain angles. LEGO purists might be upset at the Erector set that was snuck into this project, but this was necessary to hold up the laser pointer. This is a great use of these building blocks though, and [Steve] finally has his optics lab that he’s wanted to build for a while. If that doesn’t scratch your LEGO itch, we’ve also featured this LEGO lab which was built to measure the Planck constant.

Lego Printer Prints Lego

June 8, 2015 by Will Sweatman 23 Comments

[Gosse Adema] made his very first instructable by detailing his Lego 3D printer build. It’s Prusa i3 based, and originally started out as an A4 plotter with repurposed steppers out of an old HP printer. After upgrading to some NEMA 17 steppers, it became a full-blown 3D printer.

It turns out that NEMA 17 stepper mounting holes align perfectly with Lego, making it super easy to mount them. Check out this Lego ‘datasheet’ for some great details on measurements.

The brains of the printer are occupied by Marlin running atop a Atmega 2560, and Pronterface for the PC software. He tops it off with a Geeeteck built MK8 extruder boasting a 0.3 mm nozzle that accepts 1.75 mm filament.

As with almost any DIY 3D printer build, his first prints didn’t turn out so well. After adjusting the nozzle and filament size in the software, he started to get some good results. Be sure to check out the video below to see this Lego 3D printer in action.

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Large NES Controller Made From LEGOs

May 21, 2015 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

If LEGO are cool, and abnormally large NES controllers are cool, then what [Baron von Brunk] has created is pretty dang cool. It’s a super large functional NES game controller…. made out of LEGO! Yes, your favorite building blocks from the past (or present) can now be use to make an unnecessarily large game controller.

The four main sides of the controller case are standard stacked grey LEGO bricks. The inside of the case is mostly hollow, only with some supporting structures for the walls and buttons. The top is made from 4 individual LEGO panels that can be quickly and easily removed to access the interior components. The large LEGO buttons slide up and down inside a frame and are supported in the ‘up’ position care of some shock absorbers from a Technic Lego set. The shocks create a spring-loaded button that, when pressed down, makes contact with a momentary switch from Radio Shack. Each momentary switch is wired to a stock NES controller buried inside the large replica. The stock controller cord is then connected to an NES-to-USB adapter so the final product works with an NES Emulator on a PC.

[Baron von Brunk] is no stranger to Hackaday or other LEGO projects, check out this lamp shade and traffic light.

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“Bricking” Microcontrollers In LEGO Motivates Young Programmers

May 19, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Back when he was about seven years old, [Ytai] learned to program on an Atari 800XL. Now he has a seven-year-old of his own and wants to spark his interest in programming, so he created these programmable LEGO bricks with tiny embedded microcontrollers. This is probably one of the few times that “bricking” a microcontroller is a good thing!

The core of the project is the Espruino Pico microcontroller which has the interesting feature of running a Java stack in a very tiny package. The Blocky IDE is very simple as well, and doesn’t bog users down in syntax (which can be discouraging to new programmers, especially when they’re not even a decade old). The bricks that [Ytai] made include a servo motor with bricks on the body and the arm, some LEDs integrated into Technic bricks, and a few pushbutton bricks.

We always like seeing projects that are geared at getting kids interested in creating, programming, and hacking, and this certainly does that! [Ytai] has plans for a few more LEGO-based projects to help keep his kid interested in programming as well, and we look forward to seeing those! If you’re looking for other ways to spark the curiosity of the youths, be sure to check out the Microbot, or if you know some teens that need some direction, perhaps these battlebots are more your style.

Life Sized Lego Spaceship Parts

May 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Ah, 1980s space Lego sets. You may think the pirate ship and castle sets are cooler, but you’re wrong, because spaceship. spaceship. spaceship.

These space Lego sets had some very interesting parts, with tiny two-by sloped pieces printed with Lego analogs of computers, monitors, phones, intercoms, speakers, control panels, and everything else that makes a voxellated spaceship fly to the moon. Now, these pieces are functional, and they’re nearly life-size.

[Love Hultén] took these fantastic parts, modeled them, and scaled them up to six times normal Lego dimensions. These blocks were then fitted with buttons, displays, the guts of an old telephone, and all the other accoutrements to make these bricks functional. Two computer blocks can be connected together, and it will play video games with a Lego-shaped controller. The intercom works, and the buttons on control panels can be used to turn on lights.

It should be noted the Lego family is more than just the small bricks that really hurt when you step on them. Duplo, the blocks made for children who would stuff Lego down their own throats, is twice the size of Lego. Quatro are blocks made for toddlers, and are twice the size of Duplo and four times the size of Lego. Since [Love] made blocks that are six times the size of normal Lego blocks, we’ll leave it up to the comments to determine what this class of blocks should be named.

Video below.

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