A Lil' About Process

With only a LEGO Mindstorms Kit and two weeks to get the job done, my teammate, Jack Curtis, and I were given the task of making an interactive toy for kids. We decided to start by thinking about the things we found interesting when we were younger. We thought it would be fun to make something to educate kids about the art of mixing and might change the traditional way of mixing music for a party. After settling on these simple criteria, we explored the possibilities of the LEGO kit.

We ended up creating a toy with two rotary 'turntables' for scratching, two buttons for selecting your loop to scratch over, and an ultrasonic 'kill switch.' Although limited by the rudimentary programming, we were able to demonstrate our design by sampling and downgrading audio loops (MF Doom breaks for our design) and loading them into the incredibly small Mindstorms processor. With all these functions, today's DJ has the traditional methods of mixing in anything but traditional set-up.