The Sydney Opera House, designed by Jørn Utzon, opened October 20th, 1963. It quickly came to be regarded as a modern architectural marvel. Now, 40 years later, this UNESCO World Heritage Site has the epic Lego model it deserves. It’s nearly-3,000 bricks of Lego beauty. And believe me, this thing is HUGE!
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If you love all things LEGO, then you would definitely be in awe of this invention, which is actually a LEGO car that comes complete with plastic pistons. The magical thing about this LEGO ride is this – it actually runs and can ferry you around, although you will not be breaking any land speed records anytime soon. Steve Sammartino and his 20-year-old Romanian partner, Raul Oaida (who happened to be doing all the hard work of building while Steve was running around, raising funds for the effort), are the driving force (pardon the pun) behind this LEGO ride. In fact, there are four engines made out of a total of 256 LEGO pistons, and they run beautifully on compressed air as fuel.
Apart from the wheels and load bearing components, the rest of the car itself is made out of LEGO bricks. Of course, this means that the seat would not be too comfortable as leather on a long journey, but it is an achievement worth marveling it. You will be able to hit a top speed of 20 miles per hour in this ride, and right now, the “Super Awesome Micro Project” as it is known is parked somewhere in Melbourne. [Project Page]
LEGO Car With Plastic Pistons Actually Run original content from Ubergizmo. 
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What happens if you take 500,000 pieces of Lego and 256 pistons, then hand them over to Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida? This fully functioning, life-size, air-powered Lego car is what.
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Dexter Industries makes a Raspberry Pi add-on called BrickPi, which connects the ultra cheap computer to LEGO’s NXT Mindstorms parts. To show off what you can do with its kit, they made a robot that reads eBooks aloud.
The BrickPi Reader was designed to read from the Kindle app on the Nexus 7 tablet. Aside from a Raspberry Pi and LEGO, the BrickPi Reader also has a Raspberry Pi camera. The camera takes a picture of an eReader’s screen. The Raspberry Pi then uses an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to extract text from the picture. A Text-to-Speech engine reads the extracted text aloud. Finally, its Mindstorms arm taps on the Nexus 7′s screen to turn the eBook’s page. When you think about it, it’s basically a Rube Goldberg machine.
But don’t say goodbye to Audible just yet. Not only does it take the BrickPi Reader a few minutes to convert a single page, its “voice” is also horrible. Maybe it’s soothing to baby robots.
I love how they show a guy wanting to read an eBook while driving, as if their finished contraption could be used in a vehicle. Still, who would’ve thought LEGO could read?
[Dexter Industries via Make:]
I haven’t had an original Macintosh on my desk in years, but I always thought about buying a used one. But now that I’ve seen this LEGO version, I think I’d rather have one of these.
Creative artists Jason Kinsella and Charlotte Bakken fabricated this awesome scale model of the original Apple Macintosh, and captured the build in this neat stop-motion video clip:
The best part of the design is that it’s actually got a slot in the side so they can set an iPad inside of it to serve as the display. With a properly jailbroken device, they could probably even run a Macintosh emulator on it to complete the effect. Just don’t try and cram a floppy disk in its drive slot.
[via Fast Co. Design]
With the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug over the weekend, it seems anyone and everyone is once again going completely bonkers over The Lord of the Rings. Things are just going to get much worse now that WB Games has released the first official trailer for LEGO The Hobbit. (more…)
First LEGO The Hobbit Video Game Trailer Released original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Few things in all of geekdom hold as much promise and wonder as a geek with lots of time and lots of LEGO bricks. A couple LEGO builders named Alice Finch and David Frank teamed up to create a massive LEGO recreation of Rivendell from the Tolkien universe of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. The creation is massive and uses over 200,000 bricks in its design.
The builders performed research by carefully watching The Fellowship of the Ring in an attempt to put the entire city of Rivendell together. They say that research was required because it was hard to tell what scenes in the film happened where.
The massive finished model is intricate and beautiful with structures that sprout out of the rocks and lush greenery. Its builders say that one of the most challenging parts was getting the buildings into the landscape. They did the landscape first and added the buildings later.
The finished product is an awesome sight, and you can check out many more detailed images on their project’s Flickr page.
[via Brothers Brick]
Some people are really creative with LEGO. Long time CoD fan and YouTuber ZaziNombies is one of those true brick masters. He’s made life-size replicas of almost all of Call of Duty: Ghosts’ weapons out of what else? LEGO bricks.
The final pieces are really nice and they have some nice detail. The hand held pistol here replicates the Russian standard military-issue side arm MP-443 Grach. It doesn’t just look cool, it also has removable parts and actual slide action. You can remove the cartridge, which has a gold LEGO bullet loaded inside, and pop it back in nice and smooth.
It is the last pistol you can unlock in the game’s Extinction mode and the only fully-automatic pistol in the whole game. It looks amazing in LEGO. Zazi has also created LEGO versions of the Honey Badger, ARX-160, Vector CRB, the VKS sniper rifle, and this amazing Chain Saw LMG among others:
Hit this link to see more of his creations.
[via Damn Geeky]
This 30 second time lapse video of a Lego original Macintosh being built captures all that is fun about playing with Lego. You see a pile of bricks slowly morph into an object that is instantly recognizable. It’s like seeing the pieces of your imagination come together into something just so freaking fun.
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A trip to the toy store is supposed to be about finding gifts for all the kids on your Christmas list, but we all know at least one grownup who’s considered an adult in age only. So here are some perfect ideas for anyone who still professes to be a kid at heart, even if they’re old enough to be paying off a mortgage.
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