About
Build Upons: World's Tiniest Light Up Bricks
$40,144
628
We are Lunchbox Electronics and we are creating Build Upons: Light up bricks to build upon your existing LEGO® creations. Light up your robot, house, or spaceship!
You can power an LED brick by stacking it directly on top of a power brick, or use the bridge brick to route power to LEDs throughout your design, allowing LEDs to be placed anywhere!
Our Build Upons are based on the smallest 1x1 brick we could fit an LED into to create elegant and flexible designs. The Build Upons system has three types of bricks: an LED brick, a power brick, and a bridge brick.
We are experimenting with LED colors to include in the Limited Edition Kit! Get the Limited Edition bricks before they run out!
The Team
*Alicia Gibb* Alicia Gibb is the CEO of Lunchbox Electronics. She has been playing with LEGO® her whole life, but started research on lighting them up in 2007. Alicia has a Masters in Information Science, focusing on physical computing and interaction design. She is also the founder and Executive Director of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), an organization to educate and promote building and using open source hardware and wrote Building Open Source Hardware. She is a member of NYCResistor, founded and co-chaired two Open Hardware Summits and directs the Blow Things Up Lab at University of Colorado Boulder. Her work has appeared in Wired magazine, IEEE Spectrum, Hackaday and the New York Times.
*Jason Brownstein* Jason Brownstein is the Mechanical Engineer of Lunchbox Electronics. He has also been playing with LEGO® his entire life! He graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Jason has prior experience with product design, manufacturing, and design and fabrication of interactive art. Building things to withstand all human conditions is his jam. On any given day you can find him playing with the 3D printer, on the phone with manufacturers, making 3D models, or cuddling baby bunnies.
*Puppet* Puppet is the Marketing Director and Customer Service at Lunchbox Electronics. She has been doing comedic relief all her life. Puppet has an honorary PhD in Antics and Tomfoolery. Talking in a high pitched voice is what she does best. She is also Jason's boss when Alicia is out.
*Our Networks* Our team spreads farther than just who sits in the office everyday. We leverage advice and learn from notable figureheads within the hardware and electronics communities including Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun Electronics, Eric Schweikardt of Modular Robotics, Amanda Williams of Fabule Fabrications, Kipp Bradford of KippKitts, our friends at Sketching in Hardware (where this concept was presented in 2013), and all the friends at NCYResistor (where you can view really early prototypes of this concept).
Technical Details
The bridge bricks allow for flexibility within the design. The bridge bricks route power from the battery pack to the LED bricks, wherever the LED bricks happen to be.
- The bridge bricks function even when turned 90 degrees!
- Stack up to 10 LED bricks per battery pack.
- The batteries last approximately 120 hours using LEDs of the same color.
- Battery pack uses 3 AA batteries (not included)
Risks and challenges
The risks and challenges of any hardware project is in the manufacturing. We already have manufacturers lined up for this product who specialize in precision manufacturing and are confident they can achieve the tolerances needed for a good fit. There are often delays with hardware, but we believe we've found manufacturers who are prepared to create our designs and work through changes quickly and effectively. They are responsive to our design changes, give great feedback and work well with us. We have already manufactured a less complicated through-hole LED brick as a trial run: http://www.lunchboxelectronics.com/product/build-upons-pth-edition. Manufacturing the previous brick allowed us to prove that we could create interlocking bricks compatible with LEGO®. Our current challenges are the cost of injection molding and die casting, but that's where you come in!
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO® Group, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this project or web site.
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Funding period
- (29 days)