lego

310 Articles

Using The Steam Controller With LEGO Motors

April 1, 2020 by 1 Comment

While Valve’s Steam Controller was ultimately a commercial failure, there’s no denying it’s an interesting piece of hardware. With dual trackpads, a wealth of buttons, and Bluetooth capability, it could be the ideal way to control your next build. Thanks to a recent project by [geggo], now you’ve even got an example you can follow.

A custom PCB holding an ESP32 and DRV8833 dual H-bridge motor controller is used to interface with standard LEGO motors using their stock block-like connectors. That means the board is a drop-in upgrade for whatever motorized creation you’ve already built.

Since the ESP32 obviously has WiFi in addition to Bluetooth, that also means this little board could be used to control LEGO projects over the local network or even Internet with some changes to the firmware.

Interestingly, while Valve officially enabled Bluetooth on the Steam Controller back in 2018, it sounds like some undocumented poking and reverse engineering was necessary to get it working here. That’s great for those of us who like a good hack, but if you’re more interested in just getting things working, [geggo] has been good enough to release the source code to get you started.

If you’re not interested in Bluetooth but want to get your creation up and moving, we’ve recently covered how one hacker used the ESP8266 to bring his LEGO train to life by integrating it into his smart home.

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LEGO My Colorful Custom Clock

March 23, 2020 by 7 Comments

[Sofia] spent a lot of time looking around for the perfect LEGO clock. Eventually, she realized that the perfect LEGO clock is, of course, the one you build yourself. So if you find yourself staring at the same old boring clock, contemplating time and the meaning of time itself, why not spend some time making a new timepiece?

You probably already had the LEGO out (no judgment here). This build doesn’t take a whole lot of building blocks — just a microcontroller, a real-time clock module, some LED matrices to display the digits, shift registers if they’re not already built into the matrices, and a pair of buttons for control. [Sofia] used an Arduino Nano, but any microcontroller with enough I/O ought to work. Everybody needs a colorful new way to block out their time.

We love the way this clock looks, especially the transparent panels in front of the LED panels. Given the countless custom pieces out there from all the special sets over the years, we bet you could come up with some really interesting builds.

If your kid is too young to tell time, try building a kid-friendly clock to give them segmented structure.

Via r/duino

Motorized LEGO Train Gets Qi Charging In The Track

March 22, 2020 by 6 Comments

This project started, as many do, with a simple idea. [Ben Hoad] just wanted to take a static LEGO Hogwarts Express train kit and make it motorized. It was compatible with standard LEGO track pieces, so all he should have to do was figure out how to shoehorn a motor in there and be done with it. Right?

Well, you already know how things like this go. It started with adding the motor, which ended up being relatively straightforward once [Ben] used some community LEGO CAD tools to figure out which kits had the specific parts he needed to redesign the train in such a way that he’d have enough space inside for the motor without ruining the way it looked. But then the feature creep kicked in, and he found himself falling down that familiar rabbit hole.

A 3D representation of the train’s internal components.

The first problem was how to reliably power the train. It turns out the rear car was more or less empty already, so that became home for two 18650 batteries (the project details say “16850” but we believe that is merely a typo). [Ben] didn’t want to have to take the thing apart every time it ran down, so he wondered if it would be possible to add wireless charging.

A Qi coil in the bottom of the train car and one in a specially designed section of track got the power flowing, but getting them lined up proved a bit finicky. So he added a Hall effect sensor to the car and a strong magnet to the track, so the train would know when the coils were lined up and automatically pump the brakes.

So now he had a motorized train that could recharge itself, but how should he turn it on and off? Well, with an ESP8266 along for the ride, he figured it would be easy to add WiFi control. With a bit of code and the Homebridge project, he was able to get the train to appear as a smart switch to Apple’s HomeKit. That allows him to start and stop the train from his smartphone, complete with a routine that returns the train to the charging station once it’s finished making the rounds. [Ben] says the next steps are to put some sanity checks in, such as shutting the motors down if the train hasn’t passed the charging station in a few minutes; a sure sign that it’s not actually moving.

All [Ben] needs to do now is implement automatic LEGO train decoupling before the plastic Hogwarts students come back from spring break.

Can Lego Break Steel?

March 17, 2020 by 14 Comments

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines holds that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with a resounding “No”. But as the video below shows, a Lego machine that twists steel asunder is not only possible, it’s an object lesson in metal fatigue. Touché, [Betteridge].

In pitting plastic against metal, the [Brick Experiment Channel] relied on earlier work with a machine that was able to twist a stock plastic axle from the Technics line of parts like a limp noodle. The steel axle in the current work, an aftermarket part that’s apparently no longer available, would not prove such an easy target.

Even after beefing up the test stand with extra Technics struts placed to be loaded in tension, and with gears doubled up and reinforced with extra pins, the single motor was unable to overcome the strength of the axle. It took a second motor and a complicated gear train to begin to deform the axle, but the steel eventually proved too much for the plastic to withstand. Round Two was a bit of a cheat: the same rig with a fresh axle, but this time the motor rotation was constantly switched. The accumulated metal fatigue started as a small crack which grew until the axle was twisted in two.

The [Brick Experiment Channel] is a fun one to check out, and we’ve featured them before. Along with destructive projects like this one, they’ve also got fun builds like this Lego playing card launcher, a Technic drone, and a Lego submarine.

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Vanquish Your Foes With Lego Playing Card Machine Gun

March 7, 2020 by 14 Comments

There was something exceptionally satisfying about those playground games of cops and robbers when we were young, but they were missing something in that a pretend gun made with your fingers lacks a certain Je ne sais quoi. Our youthful blood-lust demanded something a bit more real, and though the likes of NERF and other toys could supply it their lost projectiles came at a price not all parents could sustain. We’d have given anything for [Brick Experiment Channel]’s rapid-firing Lego playing card gun! (Video, embedded below.)

The principle is simple enough, one of the larger Lego road wheels is spun up to a respectable speed through a gear train from a pair of motors, it’s positioned over a channel through which playing cards are fed, and it picks each one up and accelerates it to a claimed 20 miles per hour. The card is fired off into the distance, ready to take down your Lego figure or plastic drinking cup enemies with maximum prejudice.

It’s clear some significant thought has gone into the firing platform design, with the cards sliding along smooth rails and the wheel sitting in a gap between the rails so that the natural springiness of the card can engage with it. The cards also emerge with a spin, due to the wheel being offset. The mechanism is completed with a third motor which acts as a feeder pushing individual cards from the deck into the main firing platform. This achieves an astonishing six cards per second, as can be seen in the video below the break.

We can see that this is a huge amount of fun, and we hope should any youngsters get their hands on it that there are not lurid tales of kids with playing card injuries. It’s not the first novelty projectile gun we’ve brought you, there have been numerous rubber band guns but our favourite is the automatic paper plane folder and launcher.

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Stop ‘n Go DUPLO

March 3, 2020 by 8 Comments

[beshur]’s 2-year-old is obsessed with transportation, so he lifted a few DUPLO blocks from the bin and made this toy traffic light as a birthday present. Hey, might as well get him used to the realities of traffic, right? It also makes for a good early hacker lesson: why buy something when you can make it yourself?

The traffic pattern is determined by an Arduino Nano V3 situated inside the carved-out rear block. There’s a push button on the side in case there’s a spill and the lights need to go blinking red until the issue is dealt with. Instead of trying to solder everything in situ and risk melting the plastic, [beshur] dead-bugged the LEDs and resistors to the Nano with a helping hands and then worked everything into the case. The 5mm LEDs fit perfectly into the drilled-out posts of a second block and produce a nice, soft glow. Proceed with caution and check it out after the break.

Of course, plastic building blocks can do real work, too. This LEGO chocolate pantograph is pretty sweet.

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LEGO Microtonal Guitar: Building Blocks Of Music Theory

February 20, 2020 by 8 Comments

Is there anything LEGO can’t do, aside from turning to a soft gelatin when a human steps on one? The incredible range of piece sizes that make them such versatile building blocks extends their utility far beyond the playroom floor, as [Tolgahan Çoĝulu] demonstrates with his LEGO microtonal guitar.

His LEGO what now? If you’re in the western world, microtones simply refer to those that fall between the 12 semitones-per-octave shackles of the western scale. Microtones are smaller than semitones, so they can bring a richer flavor to music, as evidenced in eastern cultures. In the past, [Tolgahan] has made microtonal guitars with fixed and adjustable frets using standard fret wire. After his young son copied his design in LEGO, he decided to bring it to life.

[Tolgahan] and a friend designed and printed a compatible base plate fingerboard and glued it in place on an old classical guitar. Then he and his son spent hours digging through their hoard to look for 1x1s and other 1x pieces to build up the fingerboard.

Here’s where it gets really interesting — they printed a ton of special 1×1 pieces to build up the moveable frets. Since they’re 1x1s, they can also be used to teach music simply by moving them around to the notes of the scale or song being taught, no matter the hemisphere it comes from. Pluck your way past the break to watch the story play out and hear this LEGO guitar for yourself.

If [Tolgahan] and his son had used machine learning to sort their LEGO, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to find all those 1x1s.

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