Hasta La Gadget!

There are already a number of ways to add lighting to LEGO kits, but none of them are particularly elegant, and the ones I’m aware of require wires and a large battery pack to light up your LEGO creations. But if this idea ever comes to fruition, we could have the coolest looking light-up LEGO sets ever.

Designed by LEGO Cuusoo contributor Samuq, the LEGO Induction Lamp would be a set of special LED LEGO bricks which illuminate through wireless inductive power. The bricks would lock onto a special baseplate with the induction circuitry built in. Each brick would then have a set of two coils – one for receiving power from the baseplate, and a second for passing along power to the next brick in the stack.

The basic bricks would come in a simple 1×1 configuration, but there’s no reason why larger variants with more LEDs couldn’t be made. They also could come in other colors besides white. Samuq admits that his concept design needs refinement from an electrical engineer, but the general idea is brilliant. I’m hopeful that LEGO considers this idea for implementation, and if you want to help make that dream become a reality, head on over to Cuusoo and show your support by casting a vote for these cool light-up LEGO bricks.

Are you the hardcore military type? Are you out in the field so often doing special ops missions, that you feel more at home with military grade equipment than you do everyday objects? If so, you’ll want to check out the Andromeda Tactical Lamp.

This manly lamp comes from Sketchy Design Studio and is of course designed to look like a modern rifle. It features three Picantinny rails which are actually functional and can be used to adjust the height or attach other accessories, like a scope or a bayonet.

A pledge of $279(USD) or more gets you an Andromeda Tactical Lamp over on Kickstarter – where as of right now they have raised nearly all of their $70,000 goal with 39 days to go, so it’s very likely to be going into production.

Give your minifigs the hero they deserve – and the villain they don’t – with these LEGO Batman minifigures. They’re far from the first minifigs of Batman or even Bane, but they are the best ones yet. And while they’re not officially tied to The Dark Knight Rises, you’ll still have a hard time understanding minifig Bane.

These minifigs will make your LEGO trailers more convincing.

Or not. I don’t really know where minifig enthusiasts go to get the latest releases, but they’re not available on the LEGO store yet. I’m sure they’ll show up soon enough. Or maybe we need to build a minifig Bat Signal to call them.

[via Freshness]

I’m a sucker for remote-controlled toys, especially flying toys. Sadly I’m not qualified to fly any of the airplanes or helicopters I’ve ever tried. Generally I get to fly once and then crash during landing, destroying any chance at a second flight. RC geeks in the UK will soon be able to get a cool spy plane called the Spy Hawk, which to let you record your landing disasters – or the pool party your hot neighbor is throwing.

Spy Hawk is a three-channel mini glider that comes with an integrated first-person video system able to send five-megapixel live video feeds back to a 3.5-inch LCD on the remote control. The plane even has an autopilot mode with gyro stabilization that lets you get it to altitude, and then watch the video without having to worry about actually flying. The toy has a range of up to 600 m with an average flight time of 15 minutes on a single charge.

The system has an integrated four gigabyte memory card to store the video. It also uses intelligent signaling so you can fly more than one Spy Hawk at the same time. The Spy Hawk will sell for £249.95 (~$386 USD) when it lands next month over at Red5.

For this epic LEGO project, a team of people from Rolls-Royce the built an incredible 675-pound replica of the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 jet engine. The LEGO jet engine you see here took 152,455 bricks to build and is accurate all the way from the fins of the intake fan to the combustion chambers were jet fuel would be burned. The LEGO engine is nearly 5 feet long making it 4 feet shy of the real thing.

The actual Trent 1000 engine, which is used on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, is 9 feet long and weighs about 12,710 pounds. The entire LEGO engine consists of 160 separate engine parts and took a team of four people about eight weeks to build. The entire project is amazing, and the builders made the individual components from actual CAD drawings of the real parts.

The blades on the intake fan are so thin it’s hard to imagine them staying together. Rolls-Royce Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stein said the company built the engine to inspire the younger generation. “We are very pleased some of our own graduates and apprentices have contributed to building it, ensuring it is as realistic as possible,” Stein said in a statement. “We hope that this representation of our technology will help to enthuse and inspire the potential scientists and engineers of the future about the career opportunities they could pursue.”

Or maybe they just did it because it’s fun to play with LEGO bricks.

[via Wired]