{"id":51315,"date":"2022-08-20T19:55:17","date_gmt":"2022-08-20T19:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/please-lego-let-this-engineer-bring-your-computer-brick-to-life\/"},"modified":"2022-08-20T19:55:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-20T19:55:17","slug":"please-lego-let-this-engineer-bring-your-computer-brick-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/please-lego-let-this-engineer-bring-your-computer-brick-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Please, Lego, let this engineer bring your computer brick to life"},"content":{"rendered":"
James Brown loves building weird displays. Like animatronic skulls, or mechanical bit-flipping cellular automatons. Or, in this case, an entire computer inside a mock Lego brick. <\/p>\n
Not just any brick, either. I’m talking about the classic sloped Lego computers from our childhood spaceships, now brilliantly brought to life. They display fake radar scans, scrolling text, even an interactive homage to the Death Star trench run targeting computer that moves when you touch the exposed Lego studs. <\/p>\n
\n@verge <\/p>\n 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 \u2014 at least not without legal consultation and a small enough battery! #LEGO<\/p>\n
\u266c original sound – The Verge <\/section>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
Incredibly, the whole thing is powered by actual Lego bricks, too \u2014 the vintage 9V battery box and bricks with electrical contacts that Lego discontinued back in the ’90s. It’s enough to power a 72 x 40-pixel OLED screen and an STM32 microcontroller with a 48MHz Arm Cortex-M0 processor and 16K of flash. And those graphics you see? Apart from doom<\/em>which was a live video stream to the brick, they’re all procedurally generated. <\/em>He wrote the programs for this tiny computer himself. <\/p>\n
None of this was Brown’s original plan, but in an interview with The Verge<\/em>, he makes it sound like it came together so well that it’s almost begging to be manufactured. Yes, I’m telling you there’s a chance you might actually touch one of these someday.<\/p>\n
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