Is it Possible to Make a LEGO Drone That Actually Flies?

If you were born anytime in the last seventy years, then there is a good chance that the very first things you made in life were constructed from LEGO bricks. Over the years, a number of more advanced LEGO products have been released, and that even includes electronic parts like those that come in MindStorms kits. It makes you wonder if LEGO has sold enough parts over the years to make something truly complex. To test that idea, the Brick Experiment Channel built a drone out of LEGO parts and tried to fly it.

There are, of course, a few non-LEGO electronic components that were used for this build simply because LEGO has never made them. Those are the LiPo batteries, radio receiver, and flight controller. Everything else is an official LEGO product — even down to the propellers. The first step was to select the motors, as there are a number of options. Each motor was tested to determine the thrust that it could continuously produce, and that was compared against the weight of the setup. The motors were geared up to 1:1.67 in order to increase the rotational speed of the propellers. Eventually they found that LEGO L-motors are ideal, as they can produce a continuous thrust of 120g but only weigh 66g with the propellers and gears included.

After selecting the motors, it was time to construct the frame of the quadrotor drone. This is where any experienced LEGO builder could put their skills to use. It needed to be as light as possible while still being strong and rigid enough to support the motors without too much flex. From there, finishing this build was pretty much the same as any other drone. An FrSky R-XSR Micro radio receiver is paired with a Matek F411-Mini flight controller. The battery pack was made from nine Turnigy 200mAh LiPo batteries. With a bit of fine-tuning, they were able to get the LEGO drone airborne. It probably won’t be winning any races or stunt competitions, but it does prove that LEGO can fly!