\n<\/p>\n
A devoted YouTuber has designed and built a Lego printer<\/a> that can automate the process of assembling elaborate brick-built mosaics, similar to Lego\u2019s art sets like da Vinci\u2019s Mona Lisa<\/em><\/a> or Hokusai\u2019s The Great Wave<\/em><\/a>. But while the creation draws inspiration from another Lego printer called the Bricasso<\/a>, it streamlines the process using AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Although technically impressive when it debuted eight years ago, Jason Allemann\u2019s<\/a> Bricasso<\/a> required a complicated process where mosaic designs had to be manually created, printed on paper, and then scanned by the machine\u2019s camera. The YouTube channel Creative Mindstorms<\/a> used some custom code and AI, so generating a Lego mosaic requires one simple input.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With the Pixelbot 3000<\/a>, users simply have to type in what artwork they want the printer to create. The prompt is sent to OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E 3, which the underlying code requests as being generated in a cartoon style to produce a simplified image that\u2019s 1024 x 1024 pixels in size.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The mosaics assembled by the printer are limited to a much smaller grid that\u2019s just 32 x 32 Lego tiles in size, but instead of resizing the image generated by DALL-E 3 to make it smaller, the Pixelbot 3000\u2019s code divides the AI-generated image into a 32 x 32 grid and samples the color of the center pixel in each square. This results in a high-contrast scaled image that produces a better mosaic in the end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another limitation imposed by using Lego as an artistic medium is that the plastic bricks are only available in about 70 different colors, and the Pixelbot 3000 uses just 15 of them. The scaled AI-generated image requires one final pass to find the closest match of each colored pixel to the 1 x 1 Lego tiles used to assemble the final mosaic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Designing, building, and programming the Pixelbot 3000 seems like it would be just as much work as assembling one of Lego\u2019s mosaic artworks, which can be over 11,000 pieces<\/a> in size. If you\u2019re really looking to de-stress, just take 15 minutes and watch Creative Mindstorms\u2019 process as the Pixelbot 3000 goes from a concept to a functional reality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n