James Brown's Latest LEGO Brick Offers a Working Artificial Horizon for All Your LEGO Airplanes
An integrated accelerometer and microcontroller give this tiny brick a working aircraft instrumentation display.
Maker James Brown is back with yet another functional LEGO display brick, this time giving your model aircraft a working artificial horizon — alongside an animated radar display.
The functional aircraft instrumentation is only the latest in a long line of tricks Brown has pulled in an effort to make a functional — or, at least, animated — version of every pseudo-electronic LEGO brick around. His initial efforts featured a programmable OLED display capable of showing simple animations, followed by a version which could serve as a low-resolution display for an external microcontroller.
Following related work on a cast-resin electronic ring, though, Brown was able to embed a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller into the device. Adding an accelerometer and touch-sensitive regions, that proved enough for the brick to play Id Software's classic first-person shooter Doom — entirely self-contained and with no external hardware required.
It's this Doom-brick which Brown has modified to act as a functional artificial horizon — a piece of instrumentation used by aircraft to provide feedback on pitch and roll when the real horizon isn't visible. As the brick is turned around, the horizon reacts as you'd expect — while an animated radar display spins next to it, giving the LEGO Minifig piloting the craft an overview of the nearby airspace.
James hasn't released design files for the custom PCBs, nor 3D-printable files for the molds to shape the resin into a LEGO brick, but has published the source code for the Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIO)-based software capacitive touch and a module for displaying greyscale images on a monochrome OLED display — both used in the project.