[Captions by Y Translator] There's no better feeling than taking ordinary items,
and reorganizing them into something completely different.
So for this video, we're taking Lego Technic sets,
and converting them into powerful high-speed racing drones.
[Music]
Now, you might be wondering where Nate is today.
He is off prototyping.
So for this video,
it's just going to be you and me,
and I do have a confession to share.
When I was young and growing up,
I never got a chance to play with Lego.
Honestly, the very first time I ever played with Lego was
to make the Lego Gummy video
that is now the currently the number one video on our Channel.
But that is all changed this year.
We've teamed up with Lego.
They reached out to us,
and said, what kind of cool things could you do with Lego?
So this gave us a fantastic opportunity to put our minds into gear,
and play with some Lego.
And I have been playing with a lot of Lego.
Let me show you what I mean.
Lego started sending us all these kits,
and my very first experience with Lego was actually
on the floor with my seven-year-old son,
where we spent
an afternoon putting together this Lego Ninjago Ice Tank
that I believe belongs to Zane.
And that was really cool experience.
There were so many different parts of this
that we're a complicated build
that taught me more about engineering, mechanics,
and things of that nature.
If you take a look at it,
there's a lot of parts that move, it disassemble,
and when the tank tracks move,
it actually throws a transmission to gear that kind
of cycles this giant whatever it is in the back.
And my favorite part is that it's got a little cannon
that actually shoots.
This semi tractor-trailer unit was really fun one to build.
I learned a lot about mechanical engineering,
especially in the back.
There's a dual axle differential,
which allows the four tires
to turn independently with each other.
I thought that was a pretty clever system,
and you can see there's all kinds of knobs on this thing.
You can steer the front tires, the doors open and close,
the seats in the front will recline,
and the back here,
we've got two lifting cranes that take this cargo container,
and can actually lift it up, and set it down on the ground.
There's also a place for the fifth wheel to attach,
and you can raise and lower the trailer
using this other little knob on the side.
Taking a look under the hood,
you can see the engine actually has pistons
that move up and down as you drive it.
And perhaps the biggest project
yet is this 4000 piece industrial Digger that I made.
It's super complex, a lot of moving parts,
and it looks absolutely insane.
[Music]
So after countless days playing with Lego Technics,
building all of these different projects,
I would consider myself fairly well acquainted with
how these parts work.
So when Lego came to me and said what can we do
that's really cool, unique, and out-of-the-box.
One of the first things
that came to my mind was building a Lego drone.
Now, we don't want to just build any kind of drone.
No sirree.
We want to build high-speed racing drones,
which means these things not only need to be able
to look cool, they need to be extremely stable,
and withstand vibrational forces of brushless motors
spinning over 30,000 rotations per minute.
Here's the basic idea.
We're going to start
by building for identical legs for the drone,
then sandwich them between two Lego plates.
We're going to add motors, propellers,
and FPV camera,
and then drop in this thing we call the brain
that connects everything up and makes it all work.
Now, these drone prototypes actually work,
Lego Corporation is going to fly us over to Rhode Island
to get together with the host of the Rebrickulous Channel,
Tyler and Dimitri,
and pit them together one
on one in an actual high-speed drone race in an indoor arena.
And through the magic of editing,
that video is already happened.
There's a link down in the description right now.
You can go and see the results of whether or not those drones
actually worked.
Go check it out.
Now we've got two main parts of this build,
one is the actual build,
which is 100% Lego Technics,
and the second are all the drone components
that were going to bring in, and lay on top of it.
We're gonna be doing
that in collaboration with a real drone racing pilot.
I'll introduce you to in a minute.
But first, let me show you how to get started on the legs.
We're going to be making four different legs
for this platform.
All of them are absolutely identical.
I'm not going to list all the names of the parts here,
because there's too many of them.
But if you go to our website,
we do have a PDF that you can download
that will take you step-by-step through the rest of this build.
In the meantime,
just take a really good look at the pieces we got here,
and let's click them together.
[Music]
Now, you notice we got
four different arms here that are absolutely identical.
Now you can have fun with these.
You can change the color of the main support beams.
You can change the color of the inside beams.
We went ahead and did orange and gray and white here,
because to us this
is going to end up looking kind of like an X-Wing.
On the end here,
which is going to be the center part,
you can see we put these blue posts,
and we need those
because that's going to help us connect them to the frame next.
Now, the frames were using our 5x7 open frames.
We're going to using two of them,
and I prep this one already by taking four little posts,
and using the single side,
pushing down into the base there.
There's a little ridge so you can't push it any further.
With four of those poking up, we're ready to add the arms.
Because these are completely symmetrical in either side,
it doesn't matter which way you click them in.
You can literally click them in upside-down, right-side up.
It doesn't matter because really,
it's the same on both sides.
With the two parts of our plate assembled,
you can see this resembles an X.
Now because these posts
in the middle, you can see these can open freely to the center,
but they won't go any further outward,
because the post gets in the way,
and that's exactly what we want.
The next thing to do is to be able to reinforce these,
so there's not much wobble, and no play to them at all.
So for that,
we're going to be building a sandwich to compress
the legs together.
Then use to M15 support beams to build a friction fit,
and lock the beams in place.
These two pieces are the parts we want to build next.
We'll show you what they're made of in just a second,
but I just want to focus attention on this one.
You can see we actually built a little camera mount into this,
where our FPV camera is going to sit.
FPV stands for first person view,
and those are like the eyes
of the drone pilot as their racing down the track.
That's going to be sitting right here on these brackets.
For the top and bottom sandwich plates,
we're going to actually build in three different pieces.
We're going to build the top plate first.
Then we're going to build the camera mount,
and then we're going to build the bottom plate,
and these are the different pieces we're going to be using.
This is how they go together.
[Music]
All right, with a few snaps,
a few clicks, we've got our top piece finished.
You can see we've got
corner brackets holding everything together,
and the reason we want the corner brackets is
because that's going to be our friction point
for pushing the arms together and creating tension.
Let's do the camera mount next.
[Music]
So right there,
we have our support beam and our camera mount complete.
All we have left to do is finish our lower support brace.
[Music]
There's our lower support frame,
and you can see it's got two pegs sticking up,
which will marry perfectly into base of our camera mount here.
When those click together, we now have assembled unit.
Our camera assembly
and our lower frame will be one piece.
Now, we're just going to put this together like a sandwich.
We start with the top piece, we take the X,
and place it in the center, making sure
that our corner brackets are facing down toward it.
Then we take our bottom piece with the corner brackets
facing upward toward it,
and we're going to put those in place.
And this is the part where now we determine
which is front and which is back.
Because the camera mount is facing forward.
Now, if you look closely, you can see this M15 beam
doesn't quite line up with the holes,
and that's exactly what we want.
We have to stretch
the X apart to get these the lock into place,
which creates a friction fit, and reduces the vibration.
That's a good thing.
We want to do the same thing on the back.
So we're going to take another M15 beam
with two black pegs,
and pop those into position as well,
and just like that,
we've got the basic frame for our stretch
X racing drone complete.
Now, there are a couple things we need to do before moving on.
First of all, this is just sandwiched together.
It's literally going to fall apart.
So we are going to have to bend the rules a little bit,
and use some fasteners to clamp everything together.
Now, the holes
in the Technic beams are actually the perfect size
for accommodating number 10 machine bolts.
So I went down to the local hardware store,
I picked up 1 and 1/4 inch machine bolts that pop all the way through,
and the hex nuts are just big enough that you can screw them
down from the bottom,
and they will line up almost flush,
which is going to be really good thing for us.
I got 3/4 inch M4
that pop through these holes almost seamlessly and support beams,
and that just make sure nothing is going to come apart.
It's completely optional.
It will work without it.
But if you want to just be extra sure and actually race these things,
we would recommend it.
All the essentials are now in place,
so it's time to add the drone components,
and for that,
I'm bringing in my friend Spencer AKA Drone Pilot Spuder.
So I'm Spencer,
I've been flying drones for about two years.
I fly into the handle of Spuder,
and drone racing is one of the fastest growing sports
with over 30,000 people flying every year.
I've been to some of the largest drone racing events,
and flown with some of the top Pilots in the world.
I got together with Spencer because up to this point,
I really had no experience
with disassembling drones and putting them together.
At first, I was looking
at using some other companies parts and putting together.
But then, Spencer,
you came over with some of your equipment,
your actual Pro drone racing drones,
which made it a lot easier to figure out
how we're going to make it work with this Lego base.
Let's take a look at some of your components,
and tell us about what they are and how they work.
On a drone,
there's a couple of main components.
They all work together.
They're interchangeable, kind of like computer parts would be.
You start here with the camera.
This is what the pilot actually sees.
It sends an analog video signal up to these goggles
that I can see.
It's kind of like Real World virtual reality.
Yeah, very much like playing a video game.
Down inside the drone,
there's a couple other parts to help me communicate
with the drone with my transmitter,
and also gives me this video feed.
There are six main components
that are absolutely essential to making a racing drone work.
First of all, we've got the flight controller.
The flight controller is like a little computer
that knows what the orientation is of the drone.
The next thing you need are the ESCs.
The ESC are the part
that actually give power to the motors,
and tell which motor to spin faster and slower.
The third thing is the motors.
These motors are lightweight.
Those spin a 30,000 RPM,
and up to a 15 to 1 thrust-to-weight ratio.
The camera here in the front transmits
these goggles so I can see what the drone sees.
It's like being inside the cockpit.
And this camera transmits in analog,
which is actually an older technology,
but it's faster to the goggles.
If it was transmitting digitally,
the latency would be so much of a gap that the drone
could actually crash before you see it happen.
Along with the camera, the Drone has a video transmitter,
which is basically just to send the signals back to these goggles.
The transmitter antenna actually receives a signal
from your remote control.
So whichever way you turn it, that's the way the drone goes,
and you do it with one of these things.
There's a couple different protocols of these use.
This is probably the most popular one.
Now, essentially,
what we've done is we've taken all those components,
and in the spirit of Lego we want to make this
as plug and play as possible.
So we developed this thing.
We call it the Squiddy.
We're actually really impressive about this.
We used a 5x7 open frame,
and we were able to find circuit boards
that stack together,
and fit nicely right down through the center.
You see all the wiring flows down through the bottom,
and we've designed with banana connectors
so that we can plug into each individual motor,
and the camera as well.
These red and black wires on the back will connect
to the LiPo battery that powers this.
It doesn't get a lot of time in flight.
Really only will last for about two to three minutes
when you're really powering these things out.
The batteries themselves are about just under 15 volts,
but can pump out up to a hundred amps,
which is absolutely insane.
Because weight is so important when racing,
all the smart electronics
that would add safety features are removed from these.
These are just raw batteries.
You need to be careful when you charge them.
The thing I love about this is you just take the top panel
off your drone frame,
pop this into place, connect everything up,
and it's ready to fly.
But right, now let's just take this top plate,
replace it with our Squiddy,
and move on to adding the motors next.
These little cameras are only about 20 to 30 bucks.
It's really cool because if you put the screws in beforehand,
they actually just snuggle right into these brackets perfectly.
You can literally just pop them into place,
and they stay in place,
but the camera itself is still adjustable.
[Music]
So we just dropped the fasteners into place here.
We've got everything pretty well assembled,
and we've routed the wire
so that it looks pretty clean from the underside.
We've got three different cables for each motor running out
to each respective area.
We have two little wires here that will run to our LEDs,
that we have just going through the center at the back.
That little tail sticking out the back
that looks like a turtle tail
is actually the transmitter for the video transmitter,
the VTX.
And then we also took the receiver wires.
They're very thin.
They look like bug antenna.
This puts the wires at a near 90 degree angle,
which means we have
the best chance of being able to control the drone.
We also took a velcro strap,
and drill through these two holes so we can take a battery,
and attach it to the bottom.
That way if you don't feel like building a landing gear for this thing,
you can actually just wrap the battery,
and your good to go.
Keeps it very lightweight.
The little pieces that are in the ends
of the arms here are these little H-shape pin connectors.
They have two holes in them,
which we found are absolutely perfect
for attaching the motors.
Now, I've still got them attached in here,
so you could just touch the motor,
but the reason I like this design so much
is you can have multiple motors,
and if one of them fails, you can just click this out,
click the new one into place, plug the wires back in,
and you're good to go within seconds.
Most motors use standard connectors,
which just happens to be the exact same dimension as
this Lego Technic part.
Just happens to be absolutely perfect.
Exactly 16 millimeters.
So this just connects right here on these motor mounts,
and then we put two screws right through.
On these motors, I've added these connectors
so you can swap them out very quickly.
Now, all we have to do is make three more of these,
swap them out with their existing connectors,
and we're just about finished.
So we have all the motors connected and attached.
Now, I just went ahead and randomly plugged all
these different cables in.
So we don't actually know
if the motors are spinning the right way or not.
The direction the motor is spinning is very important
to actually getting the drone to fly.
These drones run in open source software called BetaFlight.
We just plug it in,
and then we can change motor directions.
This is called a smoke stopper.
If there's any short circuits in our electronics,
this will prevent them from frying.
[Music]
Now, when you are attaching the propellers,
here's the only thing that you need to know.
You want these things to cut away from you.
So when you line up the two propeller blades,
it almost look like to knife blades cutting away from you.
One is going to rotate counterclockwise.
The other one's going to rotate clockwise.
So if you look at them, and you line up the blades,
you just want them both to be pointing away.
And of course on the back, they cut the opposite direction.
They cut away to the back, they cut away to the front.
If you got those on correctly, it's time to add the nuts.
Oh, by the way,
I also put together some of these cross beams
that we can put on top for two reasons.
One, it will help protect some of the circuitry if we do crash,
and number two,
because we actually use them when we went and filmed with Lego.
And if you've already forgot, we have a link down
in the description where you can go see that video right now,
and check it out for yourself.
There were some unanticipated events that happened.
There may or may not have been a mid-air collision.
You're gonna have to go see for yourself.
It was a great event.
Put a really fun twist on this whole project,
so links in the description, go check it out.
There you go guys.
Our drone is finished,
and ready for what we call a hover test.
This means we get to hook up the battery,
take it outside,
and let our expert drone pilot fly it around a little bit,
just to see if we made all the connections correctly.
Shall we proceed outside, and see what this thing can do?
[Music]
Very nice.
I'm gonna do a little punch out.
3, 2, 1.
That's awesome.
All right, next Olympic sport right here.
Drone flipping.
Lego drone flipping.
Yes! Nailed it.
That was awesome.
That drone flies fantastic.
It flies exactly like a real drone.
I could hardly even tell the difference.
Racing drones are typically made out of carbon fiber,
because it's so strong and light.
This Lego drone is only a little bit heavier
than carbon fiber racing drones that I normally race with.
It flies great.
And when Spencer mentioned these propellers went about 30,000 RPMs,
he said, don't get your fingers near it,
because that can actually slice down to the bone.
So just for fun, I went and picked up
some hotdogs to kind of simulate what would actually happen.
We tied this thing to a 2x4 so we can get
this thing spinning as full throttle,
and then I'm just going to dip a hotdog down into it,
and see what it does.
Whoa. What the heck?
What?
No way.
Okay, so our support beam, the 2x4, actually lift it up.
That thing has got a lot of thrust.
So now we got two more support beams that I'm standing on,
and the idea is we're just going to come in at a safe distance
and bring the hotdog in here.
Let's fire it up.
1, 2, 3.
Whoa.
Look at that.
That is clean.
That was a lot less gruesome,
a lot more crisp than I expected.
It was, which means those are sharp.
Well, I feel like we've learned something new.
These things are not kids toys.
Here's a fun fact for you.
These Lego drones that we've made can achieve
speeds anywhere between 60 to 100 miles per hour.
All right, we're out here at the track.
You can see we have
some professional Pilots racing behind us.
We're going to put our Lego drone up in the air,
let it compete, and see how it does.
We've made some modifications to this.
You can see it has a base, so it looks nice and mean.
For actual racing, we might want to take this off,
but we'll see how it goes.
We put a 3D printed GoPro mount on top of this drone,
so you can see what it's like first person view.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
All right. We got the radar gun.
We're going to see how fast these things go.
86.
Woo.
81.
83 miles an hour.
That is fast.
[Music]
Hey guys, the fun doesn't end here.
Go check out the video we made with Rebrikculous,
we've got it right up here for you on the top left.
You want to check out some more King of Random videos?
We've got those for you on the bottom left,
and if you want to subscribe and join the club,
go ahead and click the bomb.
I'll see you next video.