If you’ve been putting off building the $700 LEGO Millennium Falcon Millennium Falcon, then you’ve got an extra incentive: now you can insert a “computer” cube with a working OLED display into the cockpit. New Zealand engineer James Brown has built a tiny computer terminal with a screen that mimics the user interfaces from your favorite sci-fi movies.
It’s no secret that not only kids love LEGO sets, but also adults, especially computer enthusiasts who use the details of the popular construction set for interesting crafts. It should immediately be clarified that the project of a New Zealand engineer has no practical meaning – it’s just a beautiful toy from a visual and engineering point of view.
The engineer originally made a fingernail-sized OLED screen — similar to the one he used last month on another project — to create a mechanical keyboard where each key had its own display. He took a 0.42-inch, 72-by-40-pixel OLED and powered it with a custom-made PCB containing a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 series microcontroller called STM32F030F4P6TR with 16 kilobytes of flash memory and 4 kilobytes of operational. Both are powered by a LEGO 9V system with conductive strips built into the tabs (LEGO no longer makes 9V systems for safety and marketability reasons).
Very happy about this.pic.twitter.com/1FofmKbqJP
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 7, 2022
The original LEGO toy computer is based on a 2×2 cube with a beveled corner. The engineer 3D printed a thin plastic case for electronics, then molded it into a translucent blue part that mimics the original in shape and size.
Yes, the screen resolution is only 72 by 40 pixels, but it is enough to display lines that mimic text and even a simple radar animation. It is worth noting that LEGO previously produced Power Function blocks, which allowed the creation of structures with moving parts, but their production was discontinued. Now glowing bricks and simple LEGO vehicle engines are mostly a thing of the past.
