A 20-year-old mastermind from Romania has built the world’s first full-size Lego car, with a compressed air-powered Lego engine. It has space for two passengers and can hit a top speed of around 30 kph (18.6 mph). At this point, you should probably watch the rather awesome video, embedded below.Dubbed the Super Awesome Micro Project, the Lego car was conceived by Steve Sammartino of Melbourne and constructed in Romania by Raul Oaida. The build, which took 20 months to complete, was crowdfunded by 40 patrons to the tune of $22,000. While the car consists of more than 500,000 Lego pieces, the diminutive plastic brick was eschewed for some of the key, load-bearing components, such as the tires and wheels — and for things like gauges, which are rather hard to build out of Lego. The most exciting part of the Lego hot rod, of course, is the engine — which, rather miraculously, appears to be fashioned entirely out of Lego. There don’t seem to be many technical details, other than it consists of four separate orbital engines, each equipped with 64 cylinders and pistons.
Without seeing inside the engine there’s a bit of a question mark over the “orbital” label — orbital engines, which were invented in 1972, are an odd type of engine that, as far as we know, never really got past the prototype stage. It is more likely that the Super Awesome Micro Project is actually powered by a radial engine (and indeed, it looks like a radial engine). In a radial engine, the pistons all work in concert to drive a central crank shaft. Somewhere out of sight is a canister of compressed air that drives each of the 256 pistons.Sammartino and Oaida say that the hot rod is capable of 20-30 kph, but that they drive it slowly as they’re scared of a ‘giant Lego explosion.’ Presumably there is a hard limit on how much air pressure the Lego cylinders can withstand, and thus how high the engine can rev. Or considering the blocks are almost certainly glued together, maybe the limiting factor is heat dissipation — those pistons, without any kind of real air or liquid cooling, are probably generating a fairly large amount of heat.
The Super Awesome Micro Project was a one-off project that was mainly done for self-serving PR reasons — Sammartino himself is a marketing guy, and he drummed up crowdfunding by telling the patrons that, “Your association [with the project] will be the most interesting thing on your career or entrepreneurial hacker techie CV.” Oaida, however, is just an all-round Lego nerd and cool guy: you might vaguely remember his name from 2012, when he commemorated the end of the Space Shuttle by floating a Lego Space Shuttle to 35,000 meters — the lower edge of the stratosphere (video embedded below).Now read: TCP/IP over Lego model trainLego's 'Ideas' page is full of all sorts of cool car models which - given enough votes - could actually become real products 7 Amazing Lego Car Creations That Need Your Support Lego's 'Ideas' page is full of all sorts of cool car models which - given enough votes - could actually become real products In the past, building a cool Lego model from scratch is something you’d do just for your own satisfaction.
Now though, Lego has its cool ‘Ideas’ platform, which lets anyone upload images of their Lego creations in a sort of popularity contest. If an idea passes 10,000 ‘support’ votes it’s sent on to a special review process, and transformed into a proper commercial product. It’s something we’ve seen happen recently to an awesome Caterham 7 model, and a quick peruse of the Ideas site reveals all sorts of great replicas waiting for your support. Hat tip to Camilo Re for pointing us in the direction of some of these! Click here for the full Ideas page VW Golf GTI Mk1 Click here for the full Ideas pageSimulating a real industrial processAt the end of June 2015, CEA LIST (a French Research Institution) contacted me, asking for my freelance services as industrial LEGO designer in order to build a working LEGO car factory model. This working industrial model will be the test bench for their new Eclipse Papyrus plugin, a programming language for automation and industrial processes.
QUICK FACTSBuilt with more than 5000 LEGO partsFeatures 4 EV3 bricks, 7 EV3 large motors, 15 EV3 Color Sensors, 4 EV3 Touch SensorsFeatures several MINDSENSORS devices: 4 EV3 Sensor MUX’es, 1 Numeric Pad, 4 NXT Servo Controllers, 12 Hitec HS-311 adapter framesFeatures EV3 auto-ID adapter cables to power external devices such as the NXT Servo Controllers.Features custom-made 3-color LED status lightsDesigned and programmed in the period July-November 2015 Model specificationsThe specifications for the LEGO car factory were set by CEA, and we agreed on some adjustments in order to make a robust compact and modular LEGO MINDSTORMS model.The LEGO car is composed by 4 pre-assembled subcomponents: chassis, front, back and roof.The LEGO car must have removable roof to fit a customized minifigure inside.Users can customize the car by choosing the color of the front, back and roof among three colors, or choose to build a sport car without roof. This gives a total number of 36 different combinations.
I had the idea of using the colors of the French flag: blue, white and red.The LEGO car factory is composed by 4 similar modules, each of them building a car subpart: chassis, front, back and roof.Each module should be controlled by a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 brickEach EV3 brick I/O capabilities are expanded with extra devices, like sensor multiplexers, servo controllers, and custom made electronics.The modules communicate using Bluetooth, with a master and three slave EV3 bricks.The car being built is moved by conveyor belts.Each module of the factory has an emergency stop button, and a status light with three colors to indicate the working status of the machine.Each module has an antropomorphic robot arm to pick and place the car parts.Each module has gravity racks to hold the car subcomponents, and presence sensors to know if a rack is empty.Each module should be able to detect whether the component has been added and built correctly.The modules building the front and the back part of the LEGO car should be hot-swapped.
The LEGO car factory is reconfigurable without changing or stopping the program.The system should support pipelining, that means that more than one car can be built at a time.The system can be expanded in the future, to feature a larger storage for the car parts, for example a large automatic warehouse with crane robots and automatic forklifts. Custom LEGO car and minifigureThe little LEGO car built by the factory is an adaptation of LEGO Movie Emmet’s car featured in the LEGO set 70818. I had to redesign it so that each subcomponent (especially the front part) could stay together alone in a robust way, and be easily assembled on the chassis. Each car has a custom-printed plaque showing CEA Tech Logo. Each minifigure has a printed torso showing Papyrus and CEA tech logos. The custom-printed LEGO parts were provided by Print-a-Brick, which I strongly recommend for the quality of the digital printing and the speed of the service. Design and DevelopmentAll the four modules of the LEGO car factory share the same design, and can be snapped together easily just like the LEGO CREATOR modular buildings.
Each module features a 4-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator robot arm, a gravity rack for the parts, a conveyor and a “welding station”, which actually is a press that assembles the car subparts onto each other. The first module (the master) just picks the car chassis from the gravity racks (featuring a mechanical stop), and places it on the conveyor, thus it does not need the press. The 4DOF robot arm is a redesign of my old manipulator robot featured in my NXT industrial plant model, realized for Elettric80. I programmed the LEGO car factory in EV3Basic, a textual programming language based on Microsoft SmallBasic with a specific extension for the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3. At the time of development, EV3Basic was the only textual programming language for LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 that supported Bluetooth communication, and allowed quick programming via USB, without having to deal with firmware replacement, cumbersome wi-fi based communcation, and long compiling time.The factory is one of the physical test models for the programming language Papyrus, that is currently being developed at CEA-LIST.