Building The Most Simple Motor In Mostly LEGO

February 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Although [Jamie’s Brick Jams] has made many far more complicated motor design in the past, it’s nice to go back to the basics and make a motor that uses as few parts as possible. This particular design starts off with a driver coil and a magnetic rotor that uses two neodymium magnets. By balancing these magnets on both sides of an axis just right it should spin smoothly.

The circuit for the simple motor. (Credit: Jamie's Brick Jams, YouTube) — The circuit for the simple motor. (Credit: Jamie’s Brick Jams, YouTube)

First this driver coil is energized with a 9 V battery to confirm that it does in fact spin when briefly applying power, though this means that you need to constantly apply pulses of power to make it keep spinning. To this end a second coil is added, which senses when a magnet passes by.

This sense coil is connected to a small circuit containing a TIP31C NPN power transistor and a LED. While the transistor is probably overkill here, it’ll definitely work. The circuit is shown in the image, with the transistor pins from left to right being Base-Collector-Emitter. This means that the sensor coil being triggered by a passing magnet turns the transistor on for a brief moment, which sends a surge of power through the driver coil, thus pushing the rotor in a typical kicker configuration.

Obviously, the polarity matters here, so switching the leads of one of the coils may be needed if it doesn’t want to spin. The LED is technically optional as well, but it provides an indicator of activity. From this basic design a larger LEGO motor is also built that contains many more magnets in a disc along with two circular coils, but even the first version turns out to be more than powerful enough to drive a little car around.

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Lego Typewriter Writes Plastic Letters

February 3, 2026 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Some time ago, Lego released a beautiful (and somewhat pricey) typewriter set that was modeled after one used by company founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen. To the disappointment of some, it doesn’t actually work—you can’t really write a letter with it. [Koenkun Bricks] decided to rectify this with their own functional design.

Right away, we’ll state that this is not a traditional typewriter. There are no off-the-shelf Lego components with embossed letters on them, so it wasn’t possible to make Lego type bars that could leave an impression on paper with the use of an inked ribbon. Instead, [Koenkun Bricks] decided to build a design that was Lego all the way down, right to the letters themselves. The complicated keyboard-actuated mechanism picks out flat letter tiles and punches them on to a flat Lego plate, creating a plastic document instead of a paper one.

It’s not perfect in operation. It has some issues unique to its mode of operation. Namely, the round letter tiles sometimes rotate the wrong way as they’re feeding through the typewriter’s mechanisms, so you get sideways letters on your finished document. It looks kind of cool, though. Outside of that, sometimes the letter pusher doesn’t quite seat the letter tiles fully on the document plate.

Overall, though, it’s a highly functional and impressive build. We’ve seen some other great DIY typewriters before, too, like this 3D printed build. Video after the break.

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A computer monitor which was formerly an iMac G4 with a hemispherical white base sits on a table. The table and wall are likely white, but pink light is washing the scene making them and the monitor base appear pink. An iPhone sits above a piece of rounded plastic jutting out from the monitor base.

G4 IMac Becomes A Monitor With A MagSafe Secret

December 9, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 5 Comments

The G4 iMac is one of the more popular computers in the restomodding scene given its charm and unparalleled ergonomics. Most modern machines that people squeeze in don’t have a disc drive anymore though, so [EasternBloc Engineering] has fitted a retractable MagSafe charger into the drive bay of the machine.

In this example, the iMac has become simply a monitor, instead of an entire all-in-one computer, and the original 15″ display has been replaced with a lightweight 22″ monitor on a 3D printed VESA mount. The narrow confines of the iMac neck meant [EasternBloc Engineering] had to sever the connectors from the HDMI and power cable before reconnecting them once they were fed through.

The really novel part of this restomod is the engineering of the retractable MagSafe charger mount that pops out of the drive bay. [EasternBloc Engineering] started by looking at repurposing an original disc drive, but quickly turned to a bespoke 3D printed solution. Using a LEGO motor and gears for the drive, the system can stick its tongue out at you in a more modern way. A straight in-and-out mechanism like on an original disc drive would’ve been easier to implement, but we appreciate the extra time for angling the phone that respects the ergonomics of the machine. We hope the files will become available soon for this part of the mod since electromechanical components are more interesting than the VESA mount.

We’ve taken a look at how to implement MagSafe (or Qi2) into your own projects and also a few different G4 iMac restomods whether you prefer Apple Silicon or a PC-based approach.

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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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