Whether it’s the children’s thousands of Lego bricks or the wealth of their own treasures from the past: at some point they will accumulate in numerous large boxes, preferably unsorted, and wait for a new use. But what do you build if you don’t even know which stones you have? BrickIt wants to solve the problem with the smartphone: The app scans the Lego bricks that have been poured out and suggests which models and sets could still be built with them.
The only prerequisite: the mountain of terminal blocks must lie flat on the ground, individual stones must not overlap and large parts should be sorted out beforehand. When the camera captures the whole mess of parts, it only takes a few seconds and you get the number and type of stones and suitable construction suggestions. They are not only fed from large Legos themed sets such as the new Space Shuttle, there are also other suggestions for small and large quantities of bricks. If a suitable stone is missing to complete it, there is still a suggestion that it should be creatively replaced with other colors or shapes.
(Image: BrickIt)
At the same time BrickIt creates a database of the existing bricks and thus offers the possibility to get a complete overview of the Legos that have been collected. The more stones in the arsenal, the more sets can possibly be built from them. Existing Lego sets can also be added to the database manually, either by entering the number or a comprehensive catalog sorted by topic. This is also possible in the official Lego app, but there are no building suggestions.
Tried BrickIt
The scanning worked surprisingly well when I tried it out. If the Legos are clearly visible to the camera, they are usually reliably recognized. Hundreds of stones are captured in a few seconds. The agony of time-consuming manual sorting is over. Depending on the lighting conditions, however, the wrong color may be assigned to the respective stone, and you have to rework it manually or scan it again. When building, the app shows the last known position of the respective stone, so that there is no need to search for a long time – if you are not afraid of foot pain and really leave the stones spread out.
(What: BrickIt)
The presentation of the building instructions is also nice, which is mainly derived from the official instructions from Lego and is also well suited as step-by-step instructions for children.
The free app is currently only available for Apple devices, The minimum requirement is iOS 13 or iPadOS 13. However, an Android version is planned and should appear in autumn. In-app purchases are not yet available.
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