![]() “At ECC I realized,” she says, “That, like most real pinball pinball machines, leveling issues, realignments, and periodic breakdowns needed to be addressed, but I was able to achieve my goal of giving a couple hundred people the opportunity to play it.”īut before LEGO sent Bre a whole bunch of free brick, she had to gather most of the rest of the 15,000 parts. We asked Bre what she learned from displaying her final version at ECCC in March. “At the time, removing the tabletop (or playfield) was the only way to get inside and fix things, which was really difficult.” But today, the machine includes lots of little doors and drawers to get inside and tweak or fix things, as well as much stronger connections to improve stability during gameplay and transportation for display.īre entered Benny’s Spaceship Adventure in a LEGO Technic contest called “Amazing Technic Machines,” and it’s no surprise to us that her amazing machine won! LEGO sent Bre several of the components she needed to finalize her creation, including the parts she used to build the movement feature with Benny’s Spaceship on top of the rear panel. How did the design and functionality improve? “At BrickCon, it wasn’t very functional due to programming bugs and limited strength in building connections that didn’t survive the drive to the Con,” Bre tells us. Overall, she spent between two hundred and three hundred hours to design, build, and program the pinball machine.įor those who played with Benny’s Spaceship Adventure at BrickCon last year, we asked Bre about the differences between the earlier version and the current version. ![]() She unveiled the current version at this year’s ECCC in Seattle, just over a year after she began building. The entire pinball machine can run on three or four PowerFunctions battery boxes, but can also be powered using an old 9-volt LEGO Trains speed regulator plugged into the wall.Įven the bouncing bumpers user LEGO rubber bands (more than 30), and the balls themselves are LEGO! Bre used several LEGO Mindstorms steel castor balls, of which one to four are on the table at any given point in time (depending on your luck and skill).īre tells us that she first came up with the idea for Benny’s Spaceship Adventure after Emerald City Comic-Con (ECCC) in March 2017, and spent the next few months building the first version, with a “mad dash” to finish it ahead of BrickCon in October. Light-up features are further enhanced with a 9-volt fiber optics element. In addition, the game includes 7 sets of LEGO PowerFunctions lights, at least 10 9-volt PowerFunctions single-bulb lights, a 9-volt double-bulb flashing light, 4 M motors, and 1 XL motor. These NXT bricks control 9 NXT servo motors, 7 touch sensors, 2 color sensors, 2 light sensors, and 2 ultrasonic sensors. ![]() What’s truly astounding is that Bre herself is new to Technic - Benny’s Spaceship Adventure is her first major LEGO Technic and Mindstorms project!īre tells us that the pinball machine incorporates three LEGO Mindstorms NXT “brain” bricks (one “mother” and two “subordinates”) connected to each other via Bluetooth. The complexity of creating a fully functional LEGO pinball machine is rather mind-boggling to those of us who work mostly with System bricks. Let’s pull back that ball launcher, flick those flippers, and learn more about this amazing LEGO creation!īut first, let’s take a look at the pinball machine in action as Bre shares its working features and tells us a little bit about the design process in our latest TBB video. The Brothers Brick contributor Bre Burns hits it out of the nostalgia ballpark with a fully functional LEGO pinball machine called “Benny’s Spaceship Adventure.” She spent several months perfecting the design with over 15,000 LEGO bricks, including LEGO Mindstorms NXT programmable bricks to make sounds and count your high score.īre has kindly shared loads of details about her LEGO masterpiece, which stands over two and a half feet tall, exclusively with The Brothers Brick. And the Classic Space era of LEGO sets appeals to so many of us who got our first LEGO sets back in the 70’s through 90’s. Pinball machines bring out the kid in all of us, hanging out in an arcade losing quarters and setting high scores.
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