LEGO Smart Brick Lets You Build Intelligent Creations With Endless Possibilities, Here’s an Inside Look

JerryRigEverything disassembled one of LEGO’s newest products, the Smart Brick, to determine what makes it tick. From the exterior, this component appears to be a typical 2×4 LEGO brick, but it has some fairly complex electronics on the inside. Builders familiar with previous sets will smile because you still have your classic studs on top and tubes underneath, as well as your 80s brick compatibility. Putting the Smart Brick through its paces reveals that it works well with bricks made around 1985. The connecting system remains unchanged from what we have come to expect.

So LEGO created the Smart Brick as the central component of their Smart Play concept. Toss it into a model, pair it with some special tags and minifigures, and watch as the brick lights up with sounds and emotions. There are no screens, apps, or external devices at all. To keep it powered, there is a special yellow charging pad that charges the internal battery by induction and includes copper coils all over the sides and bottom. The arithmetic is this: 2 hours on the pad equals around 45 minutes of actual playtime, but it gets even better: those coils also support reverse wireless charging, so you can charge your smart tags and minifigures wirelessly, with no wires or direct connection required.

The Smart Brick uses multiple sensors to monitor what is going on, including an accelerometer and gyroscope keep track of how it moves and tilts. When you tilt that model upside down, your minifigures will scream. Shake the model and you’ll hear engine hums or flight noises. There’s even a light sensor with a tiny prism that bends light directly onto the motherboard, allowing it to read colors nearby. Sticking blue on it produces refueling noises, while green produces repair noises. If the sensor detects a red colour, blaster fires! There’s even a microphone that detects taps and blows and utilizes them as inputs, but it never captures or saves any audio. It only works as input.

The brick communicates with all other smart bits using BrickNet, a low-energy Bluetooth mesh network. It communicates with your tags and minifigures, so they respond. Your smart tags are essentially simply identifiers. Each one includes a signature indicating which sound library to utilize. If you add an X-Wing tag, you’ll hear starfighter whooshes and cockpit talk. When you place a minifigure near it, it powers up via a tiny coil and provides the appropriate answer for that character. Because it is not using pre-recorded samples, the brick generates all sounds in real time, allowing it to alter things on the go without having to reboot.