A devoted YouTuber has designed and built a Lego printer that automates the process of assembling elaborate brick mosaics, similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s Lego Art sets Mona Lisa Or Katsushika Hokusai’s big mac. While this product is inspired by another LEGO printer called Bricasso, it uses artificial intelligence to streamline the process.
Although Jason Allemann’s Bricasso was technically impressive when it debuted eight years ago, it required a complex process in which the mosaic design had to be created manually, printed on paper, and then machined camera scan. The YouTube channel Creative Mindstorms uses some custom coding and AI so that generating a LEGO mosaic requires only a simple input.
With the Pixelbot 3000, users simply enter the artwork they want the printer to create. The prompt is passed to OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, and the underlying code is required to be generated in a cartoon style to produce a simplified image of size 1024 x 1024 pixels.
The mosaic assembled by the printer is limited to a much smaller grid, measuring just 32 x 32 LEGO tiles, but the Pixelbot 3000’s code does not resize the image produced by the DALL-E 3 to make it smaller, but Divide the AI-generated image into a 32 x 32 grid and sample the color of the center pixel in each square. This results in a high-contrast scaled image, ultimately resulting in a better mosaic.
Another limitation of using Lego as an art medium is that the plastic bricks only come in about 70 different colors, and the Pixelbot 3000 only uses 15 of them. The scaled AI-generated image required a final pass to find each colored pixel’s closest match to the 1 x 1 Lego brick used to assemble the final mosaic.
Designing, building, and programming the Pixelbot 3000 may seem like as much work as assembling a Lego mosaic art piece that may measure more than 11,000 pieces. If you really want to de-stress, just take 15 minutes to watch Creative Mindstorms’ Pixelbot 3000 go from concept to functional reality.
