There’s all kinds of high-tech wizardry hidden away within LEGO’s SMART Bricks, Tags and minifigures, including four very surprising things.
LEGO’s new SMART Play system is now available for builders to experience (at least in some regions), courtesy of eight LEGO Star Wars sets that contain various interactive items. Those include the SMART Brick itself, SMART Tags and SMART minifigures, all of which contain much more technology than you may initially assume.
Fortunately, JerryRigEverything has posted a YouTube video that takes a literal deep dive into the SMART Play system, taking the various elements apart with a knife, pliers and an acid bath to reveal exactly what’s inside those components and how they all work together. Combined with x-rays of those same parts courtesy of StoneWars, here are four surprising things that can be found hiding within LEGO SMART Play's pieces.
1 – Wireless charging and powering
The LEGO SMART Brick is glued shut, so don’t expect to be able to open it easily. Inside is plenty of copper wiring that forms a coil connected to the element’s internal battery, allowing for wireless charging using inductance to create an electromotive force via a magnetic field.
When a SMART Brick detects a passive SMART Tag or minifigure, that same battery and coil energises the elements and powers BrickNet, the low-energy Bluetooth mesh network employed by LEGO SMART Play that allows objects to interact with each other.
2 – SMART Tag stickers have no effect
All existing SMART Tags feature a printed sticker on one side that relates to the various effects they can trigger when read by a SMART Brick. Those include starships noises, clashing lightsabers, animal sounds, 8-bit synthesiser music and mumbled speech, sent as 13.56 MHz radio waves.
However, SMART Tag stickers play no part in that process, which is instead accomplished by a copper NFC (Near Field Communication) antenna inside that connects to a tiny semiconductor chip. The induction received by the LEGO SMART Brick then acts as a transponder, activating the specific response programmed into that chip.
3 – SMART Brick motherboards are tech-heavy
The brain of a SMART Brick is its internal motherboard, which sits near the top of the interactive element. This piece houses all kinds of important tech such as a printed circuit board, light sensor, processor, accelerometer, Bluetooth chip, LEDs and built-in microphone that’s not currently active, although future potential software updates could change that.
The motherboard in turn connects to a SMART Brick's copper wiring coil and a 45-milliamp lithium-ion battery, which can operate for around 45 minutes of play time, before requiring a top up using the system's yellow SMART Play wireless charger, which can take as long as two hours.
4 – Only SMART Minifigure torsos contain tech
There's just a single part of a LEGO SMART Minifigure that contains any tech and that’s hidden away inside a character’s sealed plastic torso. One copper coil can be found at the front and a second at the back of the torso, both of which are powered on and read once in close proximity to a SMART Brick.
As with the SMART Tags, a tiny, pre-programmed chip inside a SMART Minifigure relays information to a SMART Brick, informing the element exactly which sounds, music and effects it should play when paired together.
If you’ve yet to be convinced by the potential of LEGO SMART Play technology, handy demonstrations will be taking place in participating LEGO and Argos stores in the UK on March 28 and at various retailers in Germany until April 18.
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