Lego bricks still last 30,000+ impressions during new and improved test (original) (raw)
The Internet's favorite Arduino-using Lego brick tester is back.
All it took was one well-made weekend project (plus a little notice from Arduino and Ars) for Phillipe Cantin's Lego experiment to go viral—NBC News, Tested, Smithsonian, Gizmodo, the Discovery Channel, and others all covered the story. Cantin's love for Lego bricks, combined with his curiosity of the Lego Stack Exchange, led him to test a question every toy fan asked themselves at one point: just how long can a Lego brick last?
The initial answer was 37,112 impressions. Last year, Cantin's Arduino-powered, servo-utilizing "clutch power" test rig noisily combined and detached a set of Lego bricks until they couldn't hold anymore. The experiment took 10 days to run, kept his daughter up at night, and provided an unexpected result. Cantin thought a brick could only last for a few hundred impressions, maybe 5,000 in his wildest dreams. But in light of the incredible figure he came up with, he did what any good Saturday scientist would do—he planned for additional trials.
Behold, Lego test machine #2.
Cantin's second test run ended last month. As he told commenters from the first experiment, he hoped to address concerns about the motion of the bricks in this second rig (opting for a more natural, fluid motion instead of the straight up-and-down combination from rig one). And since his work garnered all that attention, The Little British Robot Company (TLBRC) stepped up to sponsor round two. TLBRC provided gear, adding a little additional pressure as the machine now needed to look good for videos, too. On top of that, Cantin designed with the extra goal of trying to incorporate all the TLBRC parts (such as a DC motor) even if they weren't utilized in round one.
After all was said and done, Cantin had another answer—32,066 iterations before a Lego brick wouldn't stick for five consecutive attempts. The result is in line with his original findings.
"With that first machine, I just made it on the weekend, and I wasn’t sure if I did overwrite my number or if it was off by 10,000," Cantin told Ars. "Of course the thing went viral and I couldn’t retract the number after that, so I’m very happy that what this machine found was in the same ballpark."
Cantin's latest rig was a bit faster, taking only seven seconds per iteration. And beyond the new parts, he improved the testing experience itself. Cantin built a soundproof box to contain the racket and installed a Bluetooth module to track iterations remotely on his phone. Everything took longer overall—practically all of January and February—because of his design process. The first version of the new machine used too rigid of a motion and required additional work. And while the second version ultimately reached Cantin's latest result, it misused the TLBRC DC motors. The gear grinding became so severe that parts failed and the machine needed to be scrapped before it could complete the additional tests Cantin hoped for. (He documented what went wrong in further detail in a recent blog post and video about the motors.)
"It was kind of sad. I thought I had it nailed. My goal was to run many tests, maybe 20 to 40 tests," he said. "But I’ll have to do that with the next machine.”
Cantin wants to run at least a dozen tests before reaching a comfortable estimate. And he has now acquired enough mint-condition pieces from a friend that he could categorize Lego bricks into six types. If the new machine didn't fail, Cantin would have ultimately compared bricks across generations to see if "clutch power" varied over time. He also wants to test a set of Mega Bloks. He's already considering wrinkles for machine three, including building separate rigs (one based on his original machine with only the motion tweaked; one using DC motors in light of this latest challenge).
"I don’t pretend to be an engineer; I’m just an amateur who likes to tinker," he said. "Publishing a failed experiment is as important as publishing successes. It would be easy to disappear for a while and come back and say, 'Ahh, it works!' But people shouldn’t be afraid to try and just flat-out fail. I’ve learned from this thing and I’m happy to move on to the next one."
Even if there's more ahead, Cantin continues to be impressed with his test subject based on the early results. For a toy designed back in the 1930s, he's quick to recognize how impressive the Lego engineering is. "It’s great to see how durable these things are—ridiculously durable. You can give it to your kids and they’ll give it to their kids," he said.
Cantin added that after a test like this one, you can turn the bottom block 180 degrees and the two will stick again. And if you took the bottom block and replaced it entirely, the worn top brick will continue to attach correctly. "The time it would take for the top one to not accept any other Lego brick? That’s going to take a long time."
Cantin anticipates taking a bit of a break before round three (this is, after all, a side project). And he's still waiting for that first contact with the brickmakers themselves—though he admits that now wouldn't be the ideal time to talk.
"I’m being passive on that," Cantin says about reaching out to Lego himself. "I wish they would contact me, but I want to have good statistics before I deal with them. I would like to say 'Here’s a number I feel confident about. How about your numbers?' It would be cool to compare because I’m pretty sure they have a much more expert approach to this, but I do want to see if we’re arriving at the same number.”
