DIY Lego LED Bricks
In this guide, you'll learn how to build our own DIY Lego Light Bricks! Inside these bricks are 3D printed and house a tiny LED with batteries. They’re pretty cool for adding lighting effects to your scenes and you can easily connect to them to just about any lego compatible brick. You can make them in several colors and turn them on with a tiny button on the side.
The Research Institute
The set used in this project is LEGO Cuusoo Research Institute 21110. This set was voted by LEGO idea members and was sucessfully supported and manufactured as a limited edition. Originally titled, "Female Minifigure Set", this set was designed to encourage women to get into science and technology professions. The goal was to help overcome gender stereotyping in construction play toys. The set features female paleontologist, astronomer and chemist. The set has VERY limited availabilty on amazon.
More Glowy!
Compared to official light bricks, these diffuse the whole brick instead of just being a spotlight. They’re both the same size but offer different types lighting. The lego light bricks are great for pointing light, while the 3D printed brick glows brighter and can fit in tighter spaces. But you can connect them together to make interesting combinations that illuminate your projects.
This looks great because the LED is small enough to diffuse the whole brick by angling the light.
Our printed version uses a tiny push button to turn the lights on and off. Of course the two parts can fit together, so you can combine them to any existing light bricks!
These bricks can fit on even the smallest build plates, so it should print on all 3D printers. It’s also a pretty fast print, taking about 8 minutes to finish!
LED Sequins
These are the kid-sister to our popular Flora NeoPixel, they only show a single color and they don't have digital control, but that makes them smaller easier to use for many projects!
We noticed the green LEDs seem to light bricks the brightest!
Prerequisite Guides
We recommend walking through the following tutorial to get familiar with the components used in this project.
Parts
You'll need the following parts to build this project.
- LED Sequins
- 6mm Push Button
- 2X LR41 Coin Cell Batteries
- M2x.4x9mm or #2-56x3/8 screw
- Tactile Switch Buttons (6mm slim)
- Copper Tape
- Translucent PLA
Tools & Supplies
You'll also need the following tools and supplise to complete this project.
Page last edited February 19, 2017
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