Please, Lego, let this engineer bring your computer brick to life

James Brown likes to build strange displays. Like a mechanical skull or a cellular automaton. A computer inside a Lego brick.

Not just any building material. The Lego computers from our childhood spaceships have been brought to life. There are fake radar scans, scrolling text, and an interactive homage to the Death Star trench run on display.

@verge

James Brown bought the tiniest, cheapest OLED screens he could find. He wanted to build a keyboard, but his mind's eye soon saw an even more perfect combination. He tells The Verge he probably won't sell them — at least not without legal consultation and a small enough battery! #LEGO

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The whole thing is powered by Lego bricks and a vintage 9V battery box that Lego discontinued in the '90s. It's enough to power a 72 x 40-pixel screen with an Arm Cortex-M0 processor and 16k of flash. You see those graphics? There was a live video stream to the brick. He wrote the program for the computer.

Brown made it sound like it came together so well that it was almost begging to be made. There is a chance that you will touch one of these someday.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

The Weta Workshop graphics engineer spotted some cheap and small screens when he was browsing AliExpress. He thought it was about the size of a key cap. He told himself that he would build a mechanical keyboard with a screen under each key. He ordered a bunch of screens to make him feel bad.

He wondered what if each key had a processor inside when he got a Game Boy for ants. He realized he had already seen a computer that large. A piece of Lego is not a work of art.

He was surprised to see his idea work after sketching it out. I spent a little bit of time in Fusion, looking at where things would fit inside a brick, just making sure it was feasible, and that the screen is really crammed in there. The front of the brick has a small gap between it and the screen.

He drafted up a circuit board of the maximum size that would fit and, in one day, placed all the basic components and sent his design to a board manufacturer. He paid just 40 for the boards.

He was not expecting to have to make it manufacturable.

He couldn't believe how well the boards were made. He says it's insane how easy it is to design a new computer. soldering on a pair of battery contacts was the most difficult part.

You can stick it inside a Lego brick. Brown cast his own bricks as well.

It was a Lego brick in a Lego pot that I poured Silicone on to make the mold and then I put something on top to hold it down and hoped for the best. He had to fill the brick with soft silicone so that the electronics wouldn't go to the wrong place.

He didn't let his first video go to waste. He ran a pair of wires up to the insides of each stud as a crude touch sensor, which he used to code the X-Wing targeting computer and an Elite ship rendering in C to display their array of captivating.

He painted on a black lacquer in order to remove some of the glow. The Lego brick does a good job of anti-aliasing.

He became serious after that.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

The second generation is a three-dimensional circuit board assembly that uses all the space inside the brick. There are built-in battery contacts, ausb port for programming, and a baked in touch hardware on the board. He says it can detect a finger moving in any direction.

He decided to redesign the entire board so that it could be used to play Doom, instead of just streaming it to the processor. There may still be enough room for an IMU. Lego airplanes are going to fly around a room with a working attitude gyro.

Photo: James Brown

Will he take your money in exchange for a brick?

He isn't ruling it out, but definitely not yet

He doesn't want people to suggest money for a pre-order because he doesn't think it will happen.

Photo: James Brown

He plans to make some of them for friends to tinker with, but he is not sure about manufacturing, certification, licensing, and the blessing or dis favor of The Lego Group itself. Making sure that I am not going to get the weight of Lego on top of me is the most difficult problem, he said. If they decide to throw their weight around, there is a difference between doing something that is acceptable and fighting. He doesn't plan on selling bricks that say "Lego" on their studs.

Not everyone has late ‘80s / early ‘90s Lego electronics boards just sitting in a bin so he wants to find and fit a rechargeable battery before he considers manufacturing.

He sees how far he can go with it.

I hope you will allow him to go all the way. The results of your work with the community are some of the best.