I have long bemoaned Lego’s approach to adding electronics/power to their kits. Technics seems to be its own little sub-section and Mindstorms is a crazy waste of money in an Arduino and Raspberry Pi world. Now that they are the biggest toy company globally, I’d love to see how either of those product ranges are adding to the bottom line.
In that spirit I was very excited about the possibilities of the Lego Batman kit I got in Hamley’s recently. After beating back the sales people who tried to sell me blue or white Batmen (are they completely insane?), I finally found a proper black one from the movie.
On Saturday, I started assembly with my two daughters and a small bit of help/interest from one of the boys. When I say “I started assembly”, I really mean I handed the pieces to the girls who then clicked them into place with zero delay and almost no reference to the instructions. Their spatial reasoning seems to be at 1000x the speed of mine.
We were thrilled with the result but I have bigger plans for this helicopter. Phase one was the motor for the rotor. I have a bunch of a rumble motors from broken original XBOX controllers and it was a trivial task to hotglue on a piece of metal to connect it to the rotor.
I tried to zip tie the motor to the helicopter but then the general solution dawned on me: I should be hotgluing these add-ons to pieces of lego and then it becomes a simple exercise to add/remove them from kits, depending on the mood you are in.
This worked like a charm and all of the kids were suitably impressed. Here it is in action. Watch those fingers!
We’ll switch to a LiPo battery and smaller switch and wiring later in the week. The kids have also suggested the next set of improvements which we’ll do next weekend. Yes of course it involves LEDs.