Make: Online: LEGO Archives

LEGO Archive: LEGO

November 20, 2009

Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Gifts for dads

There's a funny thing about dads' toys. Very often, kids borrow dad's supposedly grown-up toys and dad plays with toys designed for a much younger demographic. With that in mind, we present the Gifts for Dads list, filled with stuff that may appeal to more than one generation in your household. And you may also want to check out the holiday gift guides over on the GeekDad blog.

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LEGO-sized hole punch by MUJI

Paper craft meets LEGO with MUJI's quad hole punch and kits, available November 27th at MUJI Japan. [via CRAFT]

November 17, 2009

Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Santa Claus Machines

Santa's got the coolest tools. How else could he and his elves build all those gifts in time? Now, thanks to custom fabrication services, we can all get access to the Santa Claus Machines. From bespoke action figures, to interplanetary terrain models, from one-of-a-kind sneakers, to tailor-made machine parts, there has never been a better time to harness advanced fabrication tools to build objects of your own design! In this gift guide, we'll look at some of the leaders in the Santa Claus Machine revolution.

Big Blue Saw
If your gift plans call for something sturdier than wood or acrylic, you may need to move beyond laser cutters into a full-blown CNC machine shop. Enter Big Blue Saw. They have an intuitive browser-based CAD program where you can design your part, and then choose your material (aluminum, steel, etc.) and thickness. They'll fire up their water-jet machines, and in no time you'll have that rolled steel stocking stuffer in your hands.

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November 13, 2009

1979 LEGO minifig patent

LEGO minifig patent from 1979! [via @grantimahara]

Update: A reader writes in with this clarification:

Its not a patent but a design, in the legal sense (and practical). The difference is subtle, a patent is protects something like an apparatus (thing), a method of doing this apparatus and possibly how to operate said apparatus (let's stay away of medical/chemical patents for now). Unless there's a "technical effect" you cannot have a patent. A Design protects a shape/form of a product, toys usually fall under this class. Things get interesting when the shape has a technical effect (i.e. providing better grip in a hand mixer) then you might actually be able to get a patent on a design.

November 11, 2009

Flashback: Lego Recharger

This week's flashback is as fun as it is useful, brought to you by our own Make: Online contributing writer and the host of Make: television, John Edgar Park. Originally appearing on the pages of MAKE Volume 12, the Lego Recharger helps keep your gadgets all juiced up and stores your keys too. How incredibly convenient! Check it out.

Lego Recharger
By John Edgar Park

On a recent trip to Legoland, I saw a neat product in one of the stores: a Lego key rack with Lego brick keychains. What a great idea, I thought. With this I could come home, empty my pockets, and have a consistent place to hang my keys. But wait, what about all the other devices I just pulled out of my pockets, where do they go? And, for that matter, how will all their batteries stay charged?

Then it dawned on me. If I attached a powered Lego brick to each gadget to provide life-giving juice for their thirsty batteries, I'd solve 3 major problems in my life: lack of gadget organization, lack of battery power, and lack of Legos attached to all my possessions.

The first thing I did was to sift through my Lego Mindstorms and Technic bins. I grabbed some 9V motor wire bricks and a large baseplate to start playing with the design. I wanted to avoid modifying the bricks as much as possible. I also wanted color coding so I'd be less likely to accidentally hang my iPod on the cellphone's brick, thus blowing up the iPod. This is a danger of universal connectors. Since the motor wire bricks come only in black, I needed to use additional bricks for color coding. I considered color-coded tiles on top of the device-end brick, but the smooth tiles always seem to hide a Lego's, well, Lego-ness, so I opted for a 2×2 studded plate instead. Much more geek chic. I placed color-matched bricks below the respective charger-side brick on the base plate.

Next, I needed to splice the motor wire bricks onto my power adapters and gadget plugs. My first attempt involved cutting, stripping, and twisting corresponding wires together, soldering them, and then covering the splice with heat-shrink tubing. This worked great, but wasn't very elegant. I wanted to leave these Lego dongles on my gadgets all the time, even when they were in my pockets, so getting the wire length down to a minimum was important. The splice wasn't helping that.

Looking more closely at the Lego 9V motor wire brick, I noticed 4 pressure tabs on its ends. I grabbed a small screwdriver and pried the bottom off the brick. Inside, the insulated wire pair was pierced onto 2 sharp metal posts. The wire was held in place by the pressure between a small ridge of plastic and the recently pried-off bottom. Excellent. I'd now be able to cut all of my charger wires in half, and simply crimp a Lego motor wire brick onto each end.

For my key chain, I ripped off the original Lego design. I drilled a small hole into a 2×4 brick and then screwed a small screw eye into it. My apologies to Lego purists for all the drilling, but hey, Lego did it first!

The whole system was cheap and easy to build, works great, and keeps my devices organized and charged. I've gotten so used to it that I've installed an unwired counterpart key rack at my office.

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November 9, 2009

What families call LEGO

Pt 2267
Giles Turnbull @ The Morning News has a fun article about the family Nomenclature for LEGO... He writes -

It’s a scene that is replayed by kids and parents everywhere. And it’s the starting point for a unique quirk of language: Lego nomenclature.

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”

And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building.

November 8, 2009

Lego bone dragon

From Flickr user necromancer7. [via The Brothers Brick]

October 30, 2009

LEGO kitchen counter

Restrictive homeowners' association preventing you from building your entire house out of LEGO? To help convince them of the importance of the brick, why not start by building a LEGO kitchen, like this one from designers Simon Pillard and Philippe Rosett. While not made entirely of lego (there is a fiberboard counter underneath the brick), it should be sure to earn you the respect of your neighbors. [via inhabitat]

More:

October 23, 2009

Lego foosball!

Stretta managed to build a fully functional (and apparently quite fun) foosball table from LEGO parts -

My son is really attracted to foosball tables, and, if I'm honest, I'd have to say I am too. I considered the idea of buying a small, tabletop unit, but I was unsure how much use it'd see. I was afraid it might become one of those things you play with for a bit, then collect dust. Once again, I see a solution in the form of Lego.
[…]
I personally prefer the design and building stage, and my son enjoyed that too, but he REALLY enjoys playing with it and now insists we play a couple matches every night.

Seems he's not exxaggerating about that urge to solve problems with plastic bricks. See exhibit A: When a new synth module didn't quite fit rackmount specs, Lego made it all better -

Yaknow, that actually makes for a pretty nice aesthetic!

October 21, 2009

Lego model of industrial pallet handler

OK, Jay, this clip takes a bit of set-up. Basically, it's a model of a factory-floor machine for moving pallets around a square assembly line. You put a pushing arm at each corner of the square and trigger them alternately in caddy-corner pairs. Some bright bulb figured out, however, that if you join two square tracks at one corner, you can do twice the work with only two more arms. Watch the intersection for a minute to confirm that the contents of the two square tracks are not mixed, which to me is counterintuitive. Here's a video of the simple, single-square case that apparently started the trend. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

October 20, 2009

Pop-up Lego Zen temple is itself wonderfully Zen

It's like a pop-up book, kind of, except way more complicated and expensive and made of Lego elements by YouTube user talapz. Words fail me, too. [via The Brothers Brick]

October 7, 2009

Intern's Corner: My robot of mass destruction

MAKE: Intern's Corner
Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

Let's admit it. We've all had thoughts of building our own robot of mass destruction. Well, I was able to do just that for my college class Engineering 102: Robotics Design Challenge ... sort of.

Last spring my class used the Lego NXT robotics platform to solve two engineering challenges. The first was to build a robot that can cross a pit filled with ping-pong balls, racquetballs, and mini whiffle balls. The second was to build a robot that navigates through a maze, distinguishes between orange and blue balloons, and pops all the orange balloons. Both challenges had a time limit of 2 minutes.

Meet Poke-e, my team's balloon-popping, maze-navigating robot:

Poke-e is made completely out of Lego Mindstorms NXT parts, except for the straight pins that are attached with green duct tape (generously donated by my friend, Dan). I felt horrible putting the non-Lego parts on, but at least it looked pretty killer afterward!

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September 22, 2009

Bling for your bricks

There's almost nothing that makes me as happy as a little Lego entrepreneurship. Remember BrickArms? Well, now there's ChromeBricks, which will custom electroplate Lego elements of your choice, in your choice of gold, chrome, or copper. [via The Brothers Brick]

September 21, 2009

Working cello made from LEGO

LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya built this awesome functional cello out of LEGO bricks.

Watching his build progress reminded me of how the 3d printing process looks. I hadn't really made the connection before, but if home printing really does become ubiquitous, will it obsolete our coveted LEGOs and erector sets? I can almost imagine some distant future where I explain to my grandchildren about these archaic pieces that we used to have to snap together in order to make our inventions. Strange.

Update: It seems pretty clear that this cello doesn't actually work. Thanks to Phil and tiorbinist for the in-depth analysis.

[via neatorama]

September 18, 2009

Nightmare Lego

If you are clinging to Lego as the last uncorrupted innocence of your childhood, look away! This is creepy stuff, and at any other time of the year would be totally inappropriate content. Ain't Halloween great?

September 17, 2009

Lego baseplate shirt

Ty over at ThinkGeek hipped us to their latest custom product, which is a T-shirt with a Lego-compatible baseplate attached to the front so you can build stuff on it--murals, spaceships, chunky boobs, whatever floats your boat.

September 14, 2009

Lego NXT bowling game

Check out this awesome Lego bowling game by Flickr user Nxtguy. After a ball is rolled, a sound sensor detects when the ball hits the pins and uses a light sensor to check how many pins have been knocked down. After the frame completes, a NXT servo connected to a pair of linear actuators resets the pins. A work in progress, it is currently impossible to get a strike, though you can get a spare.

See the Flickr set.

LEGO rotating dock for iPhone/iPod touch

Stephen "Doc" Combs of Bricks in my Pocket fame pieced together this fully functional LEGO rotating dock for an iPod/iPod touch. Besides watching video in landscape mode it's perfect for use with an alarm clock app.

As I began to create this little contraption I said to myself, "How could this be a bit cooler and more functional?" The answer was to make it a rotating dock so I could watch movies and apps in landscape mode.

[via hackaday]

September 8, 2009

Lego Star Wars chess set

Hollywood, CA Lego fan Brandon Griffith created this fantastic chess set out of Lego elements. I love how he broke free of the chess paradigm of one figure per piece. For instance, the king shows Luke and Leia together, while the queen has Han and Chewie. Some of the pieces are tiny vignettes--take the king's bishop, which shows Ben Kenobi turning off the Death Star's tractor beam.

Since 1999, Lego has released over 100 different Star Wars Mini figures. To give Star Wars Lego justice, I decided to build three different Chess sets, one for each original episode. This is the first of the series. Star Wars: A New Hope Lego Chess.

My goals with the individual chess pieces is to:
1. Is durable enough to play the game with.
2. Present a piece that closely represents a scene form the movie. My favorites are "Obi-wan and the tractor beam" & "Greedo"

The chess board:
1. Built strong enough to carry with out breaking
2. The playing area easily removes from the rest of the board to reveal compartments to store the pieces.
3. The detailing on the side on the board utilizes a lot of SNOT (Studs Not On Tops) techniques. This a technique that came out of the Adult Lego community.

Other Facts:
1. The chess board is built on a base of layered Lego plates.
2. Weighs 25lbs.
3. the Minifigs were the most expensive part on the chess set.

See Griffith's Flickr set with more views of the project, or click on the image above to see a bigger shot.

September 4, 2009

Recreating a Vermeer masterpiece in Lego

Cleveland math teacher Arthur Gugick recreated Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring in a mosaic comprised of pre-printed Lego tiles.

As far as I know I'm the only one currently producing these types of Lego mosaics. (My next one is Jimi Hendrix) There's been only one other person who's ever made this type of mosaic. He did a portrait of a girl in 2005/2006. He never attempted another such mosaic. I'd like to think that I came up with the idea independently (my first decorated tile mosaic was of Jerry Garcia and seen at BrickFest 2006).

See Guckick's Flickr page for more projects like this.