Six gadgets made from LEGO bricks

By Cat DiStasio

When kids play with LEGO bricks, their creations are limited only by their imaginations. A few colorful blocks can become a spacecraft, a bulldozer or a skyscraper with just a few moves. Although the LEGO builds from you childhood may not do much on their own, those colorful bricks lend themselves to amazing works of ingenuity when combined with other simple items. To showcase the vast potential of these cherished toys, we've rounded up a series of awesome gadgets made from LEGOs. Read on to learn about a working LEGO printer built by a teenager, a prosthetic arm that makes kids the star of any crowd and even a working LEGO camera that shows how it's possible to create almost anything if you want it badly enough.

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The working LEGO camera

With a name like “Legotron, Mark I,” this LEGO creation could be a destructive machine or an epic transformer bot. Yet, this carefully composed collection of colored cubes has quite a different purpose: to capture indelible images. Alabama-based photographer Cary Norton built the working 127mm f4.7 camera using LEGO’s Digital Designer application. Norton’s creation pairs the mechanical inner workings of a camera with a housing made from LEGOs. It might be fragile, but it’s sure to make even the most camera shy subject say, “Cheese!”