MADEONEARTH

Block Head

Like an Olympian shirking drug charges, Jonathan Brown wants people to know that he’s never been a grinder. A Lego builder who holds a day job as a conservator at the Field Museum in Chicago, Brown explains that grinders modify plastic Lego bricks. “There are electrical engineers who solder sensor arrays onto pieces and make very complex stuff, but to me that seems like the tail wagging the dog,” says Brown, a 37-year-old naturalized American with a crisp British accent. “The coolness factor comes from having to live by the constraints of the blocks. It’s like building in nanotech, except on a very large scale.”

One of the top Lego builders in the world, Brown’s most famous creation is 2001’s Cube Solver, the first robot to finish the Rubik’s Cube puzzle. When you place a messed-up cube in the Lego bot’s rubber grippers, its optical sensors signal the color values to the central processor, or “RCX” in Lego-speak. Brown programmed algorithms for making >>^{Serious Lego: jpbrown.i8.com} cube moves in a hacked Lego programming language called NQC, or Not Quite C. The grippers twist the

cube for the next move, and solve the puzzle in about ten minutes. More recently, Brown snapped together a pair of Lego hands that juggle three balls for up to two minutes — until latency in the Lego circuits causes the machine to fail.

But the Lego tinkerer’s current project may be his toughest to date: designing a robot that can fold and throw a paper airplane. “I have about a ream of paper spread all over our house,” says Brown. So far, he’s figured out a way to get a crisp fold by running two rubber tires back and forth along the paper’s edge. His device can complete an efficient aircraft (Brown sought advice from the The Guinness Book of Records’ holder for longest flying paper airplane), but he has yet to find an elegant launch mechanism. “It’s like object-oriented software: you break down a complex job into simpler individual processes and go from there.” —Bob Parks

Photograph copyright JP Brown

18 Make: Volume 01