Flight simulator games are some of the most popular video games out there. Not to mention, games like Microsoft Flight Simulator happen to be some of the oldest games around. Microsoft Flight Simulator released in 1982. And it ran on MS-DOS and Classic Mac OS. How is that for OG? But now, flight simulator games have taken over a whole new frontier, LEGO. YouTuber Brick Science has created a functional LEGO flight simulator. And it truly brings flight simulator games to life.
The creator shares:
I had this really cool idea about a week ago. To build a LEGO flight simulator in real life that you can actually put on your table. It’s like a real-life game. And you’ll have a LEGO EV3 joystick and throttle. And you’ll be able to turn side to side and backward. So it’d be like a flight simulator video game, but in real-life.
The video begins with Brick Science, or Riley, as he’s also known, building a plane out of LEGOs. A pretty cool process, honestly, accompanied by some Great Gatsby-like music. The plane’s special feature? It has an EV3 motor on the inside that will allow a user to plug it into the EV3 and control the aircraft. For those who don’t know, an EV3 motor is a small motor designed to work with LEGO. It powers robots and other machines built out of LEGO pieces. In this case, our LEGO flight simulator.
Riley then explains the code behind the LEGO flight simulator and puts together the rest of the build. He makes it seem simple. But we know science scarcely is. Not even for YouTubers. Eventually, Riley does hit a few snags. But they’re more in the coding process than the building one. This makes sense because coding lives to make us all pull our hair out.
But eventually, after hours of work, it’s all systems go. Riley completes the build and takes on our first flight. And it’s pretty cool. Especially if you love flight simulators. The plane responds to the throttle and the joystick like a dream. And it does look straight out of our screens. Riley even pulls out a helicopter. We imagine controlling these perfect plan replicas would give one a sense of power.
Now, if only our little plane could whisk us off on an adventure. We dare to dream. For now, we’ll enjoy the pleasant whirring of a project well executed.
