Brick Machines – 100% WORKING LEGO® Minecraft Furnace

This is a Furnace in Minecraft, and THIS is a  real-life furnace built from LEGO® parts. It has   slots to place ingredient tokens and fuel tokens,  a fire that magically appears during smelting,   a slot where smelted items are dispensed,  a card slot for users to gather XP from,  

And even an XP cannon that emerges from the  top of the furnace and fires experience orbs   towards the user. It’s very accurate to the  game, and I’ll show you how I made all of it! First I analyzed exactly how a furnace looks and  functions in Minecraft so I could replicate it  

In real-life. It enables a player to turn  items into something new by smelting them,   like raw beef into steak or sand into  glass. Fuel is required, which gets   burned up. Once items have been smelted, the  new item can be removed from the furnace,  

And experience is given to the player  based on the item and how much of it   was smelted. And a furnace looks like this on  the outside, so that’s what I was going for. Speaking of which, I got some pieces ready  to build the walls of the furnace so I’d  

Have a good idea of how much room there was  to build the mechanisms. I left an opening   where the fire would need to appear. I’d  eventually have to add slots for items,   fuel, the smelted item, and an XP card, not to  mention the XP cannon. With the walls done I  

Was able to work on a roof. I left a section out  so that I could incorporate the XP cannon later. After that I started on creating the fire. I  prototyped several garage door-type designs. I   tried these two weird looking track designs, but  they didn’t get me anywhere. Then I tried these  

For the garage door and made some better  tracks for them to run in. They were okay   but made the fire look silly when appearing,   so I used what I had learned and  created these tracks instead.   Then I used a combination of Technic  with plates and tiles to create the fire.  

I built a couple sections to  test it and then added the rest.   During a test I could see that it  ran really smoothly, was compact,   and revealed the fire much  better than the prototypes! I added some Technic bricks so that I had a  working surface above the fire and continually  

Checked to make sure nothing would keep the  fire from rising correctly. Then I got to   work on a slot for fuel to be inserted. I  used a special technique to get just the   right height for the wheels above the fuel  tokens. There isn’t room for a motor here,  

So the wheels are connected to u-joints,  allowing the motor to be connected farther   away. This is how the wheels will roll  a fuel token into or out of the furnace.   I also attached an old RCX touch sensor so the  machine can detect when a fuel token has been  

Inserted. Let me show you a servo motor I used  several of in this build. These aren’t LEGO®   motors, but they’re compatible with Technic  and are pretty small, which allowed me to   cram even more functions into this furnace.  LEGO®’s EV3 controller is the brains of the  

Furnace. It sends commands to this Mindsensors  8-channel servo controller to control the servos. I ran a test and was pretty happy with the  results! Fuel gets sucked in by the wheels,   and if there’s leftover fuel after smelting, the  wheels can return the remaining fuel to the user.

Speaking of fuel, let me tell you how I got the  tokens to work. An RFID sensor can read and write   information stored on these RFID stickers, which  I placed on the bottom of 3×3 round LEGO® tiles.  

Then I placed Minecraft icon stickers like this  dried kelp block on the top of the tile. The   sensor can also read RFID cards, which I use for  storing users’ experience level. Check this out.

A furnace has a ton of items it can dispense as  smelted items. So I got some help and made a ton   of these tokens. The person who maintains this  real-life furnace can choose how to fill up the  

Furnace. It could be that the usual customers need  to smelt items like sand and raw chicken often,   so there could be more glass and cooked  chicken. Or if the usual customers need a   variety of items, then the furnace can be  filled with basically every smelted item.

Now that the tokens were ready, I began  creating shelves to store them on. This small   assembly was used over and over to create these  shelves, which I connected to the main build.   Those shelves work great for storing  tokens until the furnace needs them.  

I added a transparent wall so the upper tokens  wouldn’t fall out but I could still see through.   Next I added a ramp so the machine could dispense  smelted items. The solution turned out to be   simple, but I tried these slide pieces as well as  normal slopes before getting to the final design.

With that done, the machine needed a place to  dispose of used tokens, like ingredients or fuel   that’s been used up. So I built this small box  and got it connected near the storage shelves.   It’s easy for the owner of the furnace to  remove the box, dump the tokens, and replace it.

The next thing I built was a module  for accepting ingredient tokens. It’s   very similar to the one for fuel  tokens. Why fix what isn’t broken,   right? So I attached it near the top of  the machine and gave it a test as well.  

I also checked to make sure the fire was  still able to rise after all the additions. And speaking of the fire, I decided to  get it motorized next. This assembly has   two reels to pull the fire up with, and  gravity will cause it to fall back down.  

After unwinding the reels enough  and pulling the fire out the back,   I used some half bushes to  attach the string to the fire.   The motor is geared up, causing the fire to rise  quickly so it feels like the flame jumps to life.

With that accomplished, I was ready for the  next challenge of being able to add XP to   a user’s card. I built an RFID sensor and  bricks with grooves into this assembly so   that a user can insert their card and the  sensor will add experience to their card.  

The perfect place for it was right above where  the smelted tokens are going to be dispensed. That’s a ton of functions built into a small  space, but I did it that way so a robotic arm  

Has enough room to move tokens around. This is  the one I designed for the furnace. It can move   up and down, extend and retract, and grip tokens.  This chain also allows it to move side-to-side.   I tiled off the baseplate and created  the necessary structure to support it.  

This motor will move it back and  forth by rotating the chains.   This is how the test went. Pretty good! And  if I can move a token with manual controls,   the robot will be able to do it much better!

The machine is really close to being done, I  just had to add another RFID sensor to read   and write tokens. I tried designs like these,  but there turned out to be a simpler solution.  

Then I connected the EV3 controller, and a support  that I used to keep all the wires out of the way.   There was just one more function, and I’m sure  you haven’t forgotten what it is. The XP cannon!!  

Experience orbs in Minecraft are various shades  of green and yellow, so I used 1×1 round plates   of various colors to represent that. LEGO® has  created a very cool launcher for these plates,   and this is how they work. When the axle rotates,  the round plates are launched one after another!  

So I worked on building a design that had a  bunch of these launchers. This one was too large,   this one was too complex, this one didn’t have the  axles pointing the right direction, and this crazy   idea was way out there. I finally settled on this  modular design which has all the right functions,  

And it can be combined easily with more modules!  So this was the result! Nearly 50 round plates   can be fired from this launcher to simulate  experience orbs being given to the player. Combining the launcher assembly with this  is what makes it capable of rising out of  

The furnace to launch the round plates.  A motor and gear train drive two linear   actuators so they extend and retract, which  you’ll see in a moment. I connected support   elements to the main assembly and  attached the lifter/launcher combo.   See all those launchers rotating? Just  wait to see this XP cannon in action!

The last thing to add was the  battery box and servo controller.   Then came the wiring, but I’ll spare  you the details on that. I was ready   to put the cover on but then remembered I  hadn’t finished the final portion of the  

Roof. First I built this final roof section  with modified plates to allow it to hinge.   Then I added slopes along the back  wall so there was only a tiny gap.   I don’t know about you, but  I’d never guess that this   portion of the roof was different from the rest!

Here’s the moment of truth, will the cover go  on…yes!! A few hundred lines of code later,   and this furnace was ready to run! Here’s  my inventory. There’s 64 sand, 13 coal,   15 ancient debris, 1 dried kelp block, 6  birch logs, 28 raw copper, 11 dyed terracotta,  

2 lava buckets, and 6 wet sponges. I picked  these items to highlight some special functions   a furnace has that you might not know about.  Let’s see what we can smelt with these items!   I’ll start with something we’ve all smelted  like sand and then move on to the cooler items!

Originally I wanted the fire to bob up and down,  but I’ll have to add that into furnace 2.0!   Oh yeah, here comes the XP cannon! To  extend the amount of times it can fire,   I made it launch only a XP orbs at once,  but after I finish showing the furnace  

I’ll show you it launching them all in slow  motion, so stick around until the end! So   we saw a basic smelting process,  now here’s one where there will   be leftover fuel. Let’s see if it can be used!   This is so cool, it’s just like playing Minecraft!  

Well look at that! The leftover fuel from the  dried kelp block can be used to smelt more!   This is another cool feature. We just  smelted birch logs into charcoal,   and now we can use that  very same charcoal as fuel!   Of course, just like in the game, the  smelting process can be interrupted.  

If the user inserts their XP card during smelting,   the process will be interrupted, allowing  unused fuel and ingredients to be returned. The furnace looks cool with the  cover on, but there are so many   awesome things happening inside that I have  to show you the next one without the cover.  

Did you know something cool happens when  using a lava bucket as fuel? Check it out!   Sure enough, an empty bucket is returned! The  same thing happens when smelting wet sponges,   except a water bucket is returned instead!   The XP written to a user’s card can be used  on my enchanting table to buy enchantments!  

If you haven’t seen that video, definitely  check it out after this one! Now here’s the   XP cannon firing all its XP at once, first  in normal speed and then in slow motion! Ha,   I got these round plates EVERYWHERE! They’re  all over the room, down the air vents,  

And one even landed in my hair. Now  what am I going to do with all this XP? If this video amazed you, please help  me out by sharing it on your social   media! And watch the working Enchanting  Table and Crafting Table videos too! Hit  

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