Make: Online: LEGO Archives

LEGO Archive: LEGO

September 2, 2009

Entire house made from LEGO bricks

UK toy fanatic James May is having a real house built from millions of LEGO bricks. While running new wires through the walls and plumbing fixes should be a snap, I'd hate to be anywhere near the place in case of fire. GeekSugar has a gallery of pictures of the place as it's being built.

August 31, 2009

LEGO playsets that never were... DUNE

Tell me of your homeworld Usul, LEGO sets that never were but should have been... DUNE @ Brickself...

August 28, 2009

LEGO yarn ball winder

Rachel @ CRAFT found this LEGO automated yarn ball winder, which resides at Twisted yarn shop in Portland, OR. Now that's the kind of MAKE/CRAFT synergy I like to see!

The ball winder was born out of boredom and concern. A good friend of Emily's is an out-of-work engineer, and he was in the shop, visiting us one day. We were winding a ball of yarn for a customer the old-fashioned way, and he was appalled - why were we expending so much energy to wind a ball of yarn!? So, he took an old winder home with him, and a month or so later, came into the shop with Mr. Roboto, version 1.0. We have since had an upgrade, and we absolutely love it!

He sent some technical info about the ball winder:

The Lego apparatus serves to electrically crank a Royal brand manual winder. Two 9V Lego motors, fed by an AC/DC power supply, drive the crank. On/Off and winding speed are controlled through a power button and potentiometer housed in an electronics project box. The entire assembly is mounted to an acrylic cutting board via zip-ties.

Our customers, as you can imagine, absolutely love it.

August 23, 2009

8-bit trip, 1500 hours of moving legobricks and taking photos

8-bit trip, 1500 hours of moving legobricks and taking photos... via waxy...

August 22, 2009

Merchants of tiny, plastic death

Even if you're not a Lego enthusiast, you have to give it up for Will Chapman's BrickArms business as a brilliant little bit of entrepreneurship. Although there have been notable recent policy changes, the Lego company has traditionally refused to produce guns for the mini-figures packaged with its playsets. Personally I think that's a laudable policy, but my opinion does nothing to diminish the very real demand for realistic mini-fig firearms among Lego enthusiasts, particularly in the US, and particularly among adults. Chapman recognized that demand, and went into the injection molding business himself to produce "Lego-esque" guns, grenades, and other weapons that are carefully dimensioned to be compatible with authentic Lego products. Because the parts he produces are very small, the tooling cost is relatively low, and because they're just bits of plastic, the per-unit production and shipping costs are very, very low. His catalog now includes more than 40 items, each of which sells for at least $1 per unit. He also sells custom, armed-to-the-teeth mini-figs that are avidly sought after by collectors.

August 17, 2009

New LEGO technique - Great White Nautilus

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Legohaulic figured out a "coin method" to attach LEGOs in a new way.

August 12, 2009

How-To: Make Lego business cards

This isn't a card you'd want to hand out like club fliers at a bus stop, but for a very select few recipients, it'd certainly make a statement. For this week's EMS Labs project, Lenore shows you how she made these attention-getting cards.

Lego business cards for the rest of us

July 28, 2009

How-To: Build a Lego microtome

A microtome is a laboratory machine normally used to slice extremely thin samples of soft specimens for optical microscopy. If you're one of those folks who could care less about optical microscopy, it also has culinary applications. I quote from the sacred text of GoodFellas:

In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, then we had a meat or a fish. Paulie was doing a year for contempt and had a wonderful system for garlic. He used a razor and sliced it so thin it would liquefy in the pan with a little oil. It's a very good system.

Poor Paulie had to do it by hand, but of course he had lots of time on his hands. Those of us who are busier might consider this tutorial by Instructables user lemonie, who built a hand-crank microtome capable of spitting out a 250-micron slice of garlic every second or so, out of Lego elements and a razor blade.

More:

July 27, 2009

Itty bitty Lego synths

Like tiny pixel synths made real, Beem Music shares pics of these super cute Lego synthstruments inspired by the previous paper versions. More to enjoy in the Flickr photoset.

July 20, 2009

How-To: Change Lego element colors

It turns out the same dyes that work on computer parts also work on Lego bricks, which are also, in my experience, seemingly never available in the color you need. Lego purists generally frown on paints and adhesives, but frankly being an active builder can get pretty expensive pretty fast, and a lot of that is due to having to order elements you may already have in abundance, but in the wrong color. And sometimes the element you want may not even be manufactured in the color you need at all.

These pictures come from SaveTheAggie's post over on Classic-Castle.com, and show his own results in dying the armor on one of his Lego knights. His report also includes some abrasion tests of the dye's fastness.

July 17, 2009

Toilet paper folder & dispenser prototype

dayammerkid writes...

This is a project that me and my friends built for school (UC Berkeley). Its made of lego mindstorms, scissors, and some scrap metal. With all things considered, I think it turned out alright. Not only does it fold your paper for you, it also cuts it. It would be the perfect accessory for a fancy, high-tech, Japanese bathroom! This video shows two test runs; the first run works well, while the second one could have gone a little smoother...

July 13, 2009

The Lego sequencer

Inspied by the BeatBearing project, Damien Kee built a musical sequencer using the Lego NXT system -

Each coloured ball represents a different note. As the colour sensor passes over the top, the note assigned is played. Different rhythms are capable by placing the balls in different places on the holder.

Bonus points for the circular design!

From the pages of MAKE:

Volume 17, Page 122

July 2, 2009

LEGO combination safe

Wow, a LEGO combination safe!

June 15, 2009

LEGO tank has full interior detailing

There's so much amazing work coming out of the AFOL* community these days that it can be hard to single out any particular work as outstanding. Nonetheless, mad_a0's mini-fig scale tank, with full interior detail, is, well... outstanding. Bravo! Via The Brothers Brick.

*That's "Adult Fans of LEGO" for you non-blockheads out there.

June 4, 2009

Ignite: "The Secret Underground World of Lego"

In this Ignite rap, Hillel Cooperman talks about his, and other adults', Lego obsession. Caution: Mild adult themes and the ol' F-word is dropped halfway through.

You can subscribe to Ignite:
iTunes: http://bit.ly/ignite
ORM Show: http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/igniteshow

Ignite

May 28, 2009

Lego bar chart at Google I/O

Last night, a bunch of the MAKE team went to San Francisco to put on a little Maker Faire preview for attendees of the Google I/O conference at the Mascone Center. Besides MAKE/Make: Online, and Maker Shed, there were folks there from adafruit industries, Instructables, Evil Mad Scientist Labs, Sternlabs, Cyclcide, and more. We had a good time, met some interesting people, and convinced (hopefully) a bunch of them to join us for the Faire this weekend.

Here is one of the cool devices demoed at the Google I/O Conference Sandbox, It's a dynamic Lego Bar Chart built using the Lego Mindstorms NXT System.

Lego Bar Chart

May 10, 2009

iPhone controlled LEGO robot

BattleBricks posted awesome building instructions on how to get your own iPhone controlled LEGO robot working!

This is a demonstration of iPhone to Lego NXT Robot communication via the Safari browser and Lego's Light Sensor. To build this, you'll need a laptop, two iPhones, and a Lego NXT Robotics Kit. First, build your robot. Second write some Java LeJOS Robot code. Third write some Google Web Toolkit web application code. Fourth, plug in your iPhone into the robot, and use either a browser or another iPhone to drive the Lego Robot!

April 27, 2009

Mini Maker Faire at Hillsdale Mall

MAKE HQ reports that they had a nice turnout and a fine time this past weekend at Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo. Our compadre Kent Barnes took these photos and has more in his photostream. It was a great opportunity to reach out to people who might otherwise not have previous exposure to MAKE. We'll be doing a few more of such events in the future, so stay tuned. Thanks for takin' the snaps, Kent.

Kentb's Photostream

Lego motor shield for Arduino

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Joining the modular forces of Arduino and Lego, Greg and Rael built the above-seen motor shield with a convenient plastic brick interface. Head over to Flickr for more project pics.

In the Maker Shed:

MotorShield for Arduino Kit

March 22, 2009

LEGO NXT 3D scanner

LEGO hacker Philo Hurbain needed a way to model some of the more complex LEGO parts for use in the LDraw LEGO CAD program. Most LEGO parts are easy to model, but something like the tiny LEGO frog, shown above, is a little more tricky. Philo's solution: a 3D scanner made entirely of LEGO, save for a needle that's used as the probe.

I am a LDraw parts author, and as such I am always interested to find new ways to model LEGO parts. Many parts have a clear geometric structure and are relatively easy to create, but parts like the frog pictured above have no defined geometric shape and are very difficult to model. I toyed for a while with the idea of a 3D scanner... The solution came with 2008 LEGO Technic sets that include a new part, the linear actuator. These nifty device convert the rotation movement of a motor into a linear movement. Coupled with the high resolution of NXT encoder, I had all the elements to build a 3D scanner, precise enough for my purpose.

...

The probe module (red/yellow) moves the probing needle back and forth as well as up and down. When the probe needle touches the object, the location of the contact point is recorded. The object module (white/blue) is able to move back and forth the object and rotate it. All the movements combined provide either a cartesian or a cylindrical scan.

If you're interested in making one of these, Philo has posted the MLCad files for the device, the pbLua source that operates the NXT brain, and instructions for turning the scan coordinate log into a usable mesh.

NXT 3D scanner [via Dan's Data Blog]