Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pretty Protoypes

December 4, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Some like it flat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What you are looking at is the first prototype of Atlas by [AsicResistor], which is still a work in progress. [AsicResistor] found the Totem to be a bit cramped, so naturally, it was time to design a keyboard from the ground up.

The case is wood, if that’s not immediately obvious. This fact is easily detectable in the lovely render, but I didn’t want to show you that here.

This travel-friendly keyboard has 34 keys and dual trackpoints, one on each half. If the nubbin isn’t your thing, there’s an optional, oversized trackball, which I would totally opt for. But I would need an 8-ball instead, simply because that’s my number.

A build video is coming at some point, so watch the GitHub, I suppose, or haunt r/ergomechkeyboards.

Flat as it may be, I would totally at least give this keyboard a fair chance. There’s just something about those keycaps, for starters. (Isn’t it always the keycaps with me?) For another, I dig the pinky stagger. I’m not sure that two on each side is nearly enough thumb keys for me, however.

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Making A Machine To Sort One Million Pounds Of LEGO

November 16, 2025 by John Elliot V 22 Comments

You know what’s not fun? Sorting LEGO. You know what is fun? Making a machine to sort LEGO! That’s what [LegoSpencer] did, and you can watch the machine do its thing in the video below.

[Spencer] runs us through the process: first, quit your day job so you can get a job playing with LEGO; then research what previous work has been done in this area (plenty, it turns out); and then commit to making your own version both reproducible and extensible.

A sorting machine needs three main features: a feeder to dispense one piece at a time, a classifier to decide the type of piece, and a distributor to route the piece to a bin. Of course, the devil is in the details.

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Building A Drivable, Life-Size 3D-Printed LEGO Technic Buggy

November 14, 2025 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

The 8845 LEGO Technic Dune Buggy original. (Credit: Matt Denton)

It’s part of the great circle of life that toys and scale models that provide a reflection of macro-sized objects like vehicles and buildings will eventually be scaled up again to life-sized proportions. Case in point the LEGO Technic dune buggy that [Matt Denton] recently printed at effectively human scale, while also making it actually drivable.

The basis for this project is the 8845 Dune Buggy which was released in 1981. Unlike the modern 42101 version, it’s more straightforward and also seems more amenable to actually sitting in despite featuring more pieces for a total of 174 pieces. Naturally, [Matt] didn’t simply go for a naïve build of the 8845 buggy, but made a few changes. First is the scale that’s 10.42 times larger than the LEGO original, based around the use of 50 mm bearings. The model was also modified to be a single-seater, with the steering wheel placed in the center.

With some structural and ergonomic tweaks in place, the resulting CAD model was printed out mostly in PLA with a 1 mm nozzle and 10% infill using a belt FDM printer to help with the sheer size of the parts. After that it was mostly a LEGO kit assembly on a ludicrous scale that resembles a cross between building a LEGO kit and assembling Ikea flatpack furniture.

At merely the cost of most of his sanity, [Matt] finally got the whole kit together, still leaving a few suspension issues to resolve, as it turns out that so much plastic actually weighs a lot, at 102 kg. With that and other issues resolved, the final touch was to add an electric motor to the whole kit using a belt-driven system on the rear axle and bringing every LEGO minifig’s dreams to life.

After a few test drives, some issues did pop up, including durability concerns and not a lot of performance, but overall it performs much better than you’d expect from a kid’s toy.

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Making Steam-Powered LEGO Machines

November 6, 2025 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Over the decades we have seen a lot of methods for powering LEGO-based contraptions, ranging from LEGO Technic pneumatics to electric motors, but what about steam power? We have all seen those cute little model steam engines that can definitely put out some power. Sure, you can just drop those in like a kind of confused internal combustion engine, or you can try to make a steam engine that actually tries to be directly compatible with LEGO.

While exploring this topic, [Jamie’s Brick Jams] on YouTube found that the primary concern here is simply the very hot steam produced by the boiler. While not a surprise to anyone who has ever run a model steam engine, this poses a major challenge to the thermoplastics used by LEGO.

Obviously a boiler cannot be made out of plastic, but the steam turbine can. That said, material selection here is key, as the hot, wet steam produced by the boiler demolishes PLA parts and ruined the original and very unsafe copper boiler in the process. Ultimately a LEGO Technic-compatible steam turbine was printed in high temperature resistant PAHT-CF and PC filament, which enables a steam-powered LEGO walker to come to life, albeit with a distinct lack of power.

Model steam engine enthusiasts are of course quick to point out that you should try to create dry steam through superheating, definitely add a safety valve and so on, all of which should make for an even more powerful and safe LEGO steam engine. For a rundown of how steam engines work, [Lawrie] did an excellent video on the basics a while back, as well as a video playlist full of demonstrations of both classical Mamod model engines and questionable modern takes.

Suffice it to say that although model steam engines look like toys, they involve fire, hot steam and other fascinating ways to melt things, light them on fire and cause painful injuries, so definitely follow a safety briefing before attempting any of it at home.

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Building The DVD Logo Screensaver With LEGO

October 8, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The completed Lego DVD screensaver. (Credit: Grant Davis, YouTube)

There’s something extremely calming and pleasing about watching a screensaver that merely bounces some kind of image around, with the DVD logo screensaver of a DVD player being a good example. The logical conclusion is thus that it would be great to replicate this screensaver in Lego, because it’d be fun and easy. That’s where [Grant Davis]’s life got flipped upside-down, as this turned out to be anything but an easy task in his chosen medium.

Things got off on a rocky start with figuring out how to make the logo bounce against the side of the ‘screen’, instead of having it merely approach before backing off. The right approach here seemed to be Lego treads as used on e.g. excavators, which give the motion that nice pause before ‘bouncing’ back in the other direction.

With that seemingly solved, most of the effort went into assembling a functional yet sturdy frame, all driven by a single Lego Technic electromotor. Along the way there were many cases of rapid self-disassembly, ultimately leading to a complete redesign using worm gears, thus requiring running the gears both ways with help from a gearbox.

Since the screensaver is supposed to run unattended, many end-stop and toggle mechanisms were tried and discarded before settling on the design that would be used for the full-sized build. Naturally, scaling up always goes smoothly, so everything got redesigned and beefed up once again, with more motors added and multiple gearbox design changes attempted after some unfortunate shredded gears.

Ultimately [Grant] got what he set out to do: the DVD logo bouncing around on a Lego ‘TV’ in a very realistic fashion, set to the noise of Lego Technic gears and motors whirring away in the background.

Thanks to [Carl Foxmarten] for the tip.

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Blocky tread, yellow hub-- yep, it looks like LEGO

10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia

September 29, 2025 by Tyler August 6 Comments

If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a 10″ TPU tyre will never go flat, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.

The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for truly open-sourcing the design instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.

As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.

While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will outperform any other plastic he might have printed. This project is probably more practical than a 3D printed bicycle tyre, which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy. Continue reading “10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia” →

There Are Better Lego-Compatible Universal Joints Out There

July 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

Lego’s Technic line features all kinds of mechanical devices, from cogs to gears to chains and even pneumatic components. However, the vast majority of these components are made out of plastic and are only capable of toy-like levels of performance. In the competitive world of Lego YouTube, builders often push these parts to their limits, breaking them more often than you might think. To that end, [Brick Experiment Channel] has been investigating stouter Lego-compatible universal joints from a variety of third-party manufacturers.

The video starts with a simple demonstration, showing that a Lego universal joint pops apart at just 0.4 Nm of torque. It’s no surprise, given it relies on tiny plastic pins in snap-fit joints. However, this means that it’s not that hard to build a stronger universal joint to outperform the stock parts.

The video steps through a range of other options available on the market. For example, CaDA builds a universal joint using aluminium sleeves, a copper center, and steel pins to join everything together. It’s so strong that the plastic Lego axles fail long before the joint does. Tested with third-party aluminum axles, it eventually fails at 2.3 Nm of torque when the aluminum sleeve snaps. An all-steel joint from MTP goes even harder, eventually stripping out its axle mount at 4 Nm. The rest of the video goes on to explore angular performance, size, and other design features.

It’s fair to say that if you’re swapping out universal joints and axles for aluminum steel parts, you’re not really playing with Lego anymore. At the same time, it’s neat that there exists a sort of defacto standard kit for mechanical experimentation that is now being expanded upon with stronger components. Video after the break.

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