James Brown loves to build weird displays. Like animatronic skulls or mechanical cellular automata that tip over. Or, in this case, a whole computer inside some brick pieces of Lego.
Not just any brick. It’s talking about the classic leaning Lego computers from childhood spaceships, now brilliantly brought to life. They show fake radar scans, scrolling texts, even an interactive homage to the Death Star trench segmentation computer that moves when exposed Lego studs are touched.
Incredibly, all of this is also powered by real Lego bricks: the vintage 9V battery box and bricks with electrical contacts that Lego discontinued in the 90s. Simply power a 72 x 40 pixel OLED display and an STM32 microcontroller with a 48 MHz Arm Cortex-M0 processor and 16K flash .
And those graphics that you see? Aside from Doom, which was a live video stream to the brick, they’re all procedurally generated. He himself wrote the programs for this little computer.
None of this was Brown’s original plan, but in an interview with TheVerge, makes it look like it came together so well it’s almost begging to be made.
Last year, Weta Workshop’s graphic engineer was browsing AliExpress when he saw some incredibly small and cheap 0.42-inch OLED screens. “That’s about the size of a key cover,” thought.
He would build a mechanical keyboard with a screen under each key, he told himself, but the project was slow. “I ordered a batch of screens just to have them sit there and make me feel guilty,” he says.
But when a Game Boy for Ants arrived on his doorstep this May, he began to ponder: What if each key also had a processor inside? Later that day, he suddenly realized that he had seen a computer that size before. A piece of Lego doesn’t work.
So he sketched it out and was surprised that his idea could work. “I spent a little bit of time on Fusion, just looking at where things would fit inside a brick, just making sure it was really doable and just. You know the screen is really crowded there, right? There is only 0.1mm between the screen and the front surface of the brick.
He drafted a circuit board the largest size it would fit, and in a single day, laid out all the basic components and sent his design to a board maker on a whim. He paid only 40 dollars, including shipping, for five small boards.
However, after her first video went viral, she didn’t let it go. He ran a couple of wires to the inside of each stud like a crude touch sensor, “the processor counts how long it takes to pull high through a resistor,” he says, coding the X-Wing segmentation computer and an Elite ship renderer in C to display his array of fascinating low-poly wireframes with a press .
He also painted in a black lacquer to get rid of some of the shine, though he’s actually quite happy with the spiky Lego finish. “The Lego brick texture does a very good job of smoothing.”
On Zoom, Brown shows me the second generation: a new three-dimensional circuit board assembly designed to use all the space inside the brick.
It has built-in battery contacts, a USB port for programming instead of the old serial debug pins, and capacitive touch hardware baked into the board itself. Say what can reliably detect a finger moving around an entire region above the brick.
And because you’re not satisfied with just streaming Doom to the STM32 processor as a video over those debug cables, recently redesigned the entire board to fit a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, which could actually play Doom as well.
and says that There may still be enough room to fit an IMU for motion controls. He plans to produce some of them for his friends to tinker with, but he’s still unsure about the manufacture, certification, licenses and, above all, the blessing or disapproval of the Lego Group itself. Clearing it up with Lego, or at least “making sure I’m not going to put the weight of Lego on top of me” is the hardest problem, he says.
“There is a difference between doing something that is acceptable and actually being able to fight if they decide to throw their weight.” Obviously, he doesn’t plan on selling any bricks that literally say “Lego” on the tacks on it: his friday tweet shows a brick leaving the logo.
Lastly, you also want to find and fit a rechargeable battery before considering manufacturing, because not everyone has Lego electronic boards from the late 80’s/early 90’s sitting in a bin.
