A robotic ‘printer’ made fully out of Lego

In a video uploaded on June 8, Dutch YouTuber Sten, a Lego devotee who runs the Inventive Mindstorms channel on the social media platform, chronicles the creation of the Pixelbot 3000, from constructing its mechanism to ‘printing’ the ultimate product.

The Pixelbot is actually a next-level model of the Bricasso printer, developed about 9 years in the past by JK Brickworks. Constructed fully from Lego components, the Bricasso scanned a pre-pixelated supply picture and saved it to a Lego Mindstorms EV3 unit. The saved knowledge was then used to supply a mosaic utilizing 1 x 1 bricks. Mindstorms, which has been discontinued, was launched as an academic package for constructing programmable robots from Lego bricks and elements.

The creation of the Pixelbot concerned quite a lot of trial and error, one thing Sten repeatedly makes clear all through the video.

“So, the plan is to make an AI picture generator, and I used to be considering it may be a good suggestion to make use of these 16 x 16 base plates after which make a pixel artwork out of these little 1 x 1 plates,” he says firstly of the video.

Inventive Mindstorms

A couple of days later, after “reconsidering”, he began over, changing the 16 x 16 base plate with a 32 x 32 one because it produced a superior picture. A couple of days after that, the unique rack and pinion mechanism that moved the platform was changed by screw items. After perfecting the system, Sten labored on the software program that drives it.

Somewhat than utilizing a pre-pixelated scanned picture just like the Bricasso, Open AI’s DALL-E 3 generates a cartoon-like picture that’s ‘printed’ as a mosaic. Utilizing Python, the YouTuber wrote code that divided the high-resolution, 1024 x 1024 supply picture right into a 32 x 32 grid and picked the colour of the middle pixel of every house to enhance the sharpness of the ensuing mosaic.

Nonetheless, that was nonetheless too many coloration values for Pixelbot to deal with (Lego solely has 70 colours), so Sten made the machine go over each pixel within the supply picture, select the closest coloration, and exchange it with a Lego-friendly coloration.

As a result of the machine must be ultra-precise when inserting its bricks, Sten added contact sensors. After trialing the robotic, he observed that the bricks ran out shortly, so he added a “high quality of life characteristic”: coding that made the system cease when it ran out of any coloration.

The ultimate step was selecting a picture to ‘print’. Sten left that call as much as his different creation, Dave, the world’s first AI-powered Lego robotic head. Dave determined the picture must be of a ‘quirky robotic holding a sunflower.’

You may watch the 15-minute video of the Pixelbot 3000’s creation, together with seeing how the ultimate Lego mosaic picture turned out, beneath. The Pixelbot 3000 code is offered for obtain on GitHub.