It was bound to happen sooner or later, so it comes as no surprise when someone made a working drone using the world’s most buildable children’s toy. The Brick Experiment Channel takes LEGO blocks to the sky and shows us how to make our own toy drones:
The motors, propellers, and drone body are entirely made from LEGOs. Four LEGO L-motors turn eight LEGO Propeller 1 Blade 14Ls. These are connected via a series of gears and are held up using some sturdy LEGO liftarms and a variety of LEGO pieces.
While smaller than the LEGO parts, there are a number of essential non-LEGO pieces that make the drone flyable.
You have a LiPo 9s 33.3V 200 mAh battery which powers the motors. The FrSky R-XSR Micro 2.4GHz radio receiver and the FrSky X-Lite 2.4GHz radio transmitter send signals using the onboard Matek F411-mini flight controller. There are also four MOSFET IRLR2905 + Schottky diode 1N5819 + Resistor 12 kOhm motor driver circuits and a number of smaller electronics holding everything together.
After some set up on a computer and pairing it to a controller, the drone is ready to go. The completed LEGO drone weighs a total of 410 grams and can reach a max thrust of 470 grams. It can perform simple maneuvers like flying under and onto tables and has a sustained flight time of two minutes before it falls out of exhaustion.
All-in-all, the LEGO pieces, and electronics needed to make this drone cost about 502 USD. You could buy a cheap pre-assembled drone with that kind of money, but you would lose all sense of accomplishment in building it yourself.
For more LEGO technic builds, you can check out the Brick Experiment Channel.
