‘We set some pretty high ambition levels’ — Lego on why Smart Bricks needed custom wireless charging
Even though we’re just weeks away from Lego unveiling its Smart Play system – one of the biggest changes to the iconic brick in years – there’s still plenty of talk surrounding the first three sets. Much of it focuses on the all-important Smart Brick.
One of the more understated, but truly impressive, parts of Lego’s new Smart Play system isn’t the lights or speaker inside the Smart Brick. This is how the brick stays powered and how it recharges without disrupting gameplay.
Like the custom silicon and other technologies inside the Smart Brick, the wireless charging system itself is not commercially available. It’s not Qi-based and doesn’t rely on existing consumer wireless charging standards – and according to Lego, that was entirely intentional.
“We didn’t just want you to be able to put it anywhere,” Tom Donaldson, head of Lego’s Creative Play Lab, told me. “We actually wanted to be able to load high when you’re in a scale model.”
This distinction is important. The goal was not just the freedom to place Smart Bricks on a charging pad, but the ability to charge Smart Bricks while they are still embedded in a build.
Donaldson confirmed in a one-on-one conversation with TechRadar that the underlying technology was designed with transmission power in mind, meaning energy can travel through other Lego bricks.
In practical terms, a Smart Brick could stay inside an object like a Lego car and continue to receive power while driving or parking the model on the charger. Donaldson confirmed this capability, while being careful not to go into technical details.
“This is an entry-level charger, so I can’t talk too much about it,” he said, before adding that the technology behind it was designed so that bricks could stay inside a model while charging.
“It’s actually quite advanced from at least where we started the program,” Donaldson said. “So we set quite high levels of ambition – and that’s why we became owners.”
Development of Smart Play’s charging technology began about eight years ago, well before today’s more flexible wireless charging approaches had matured. At the time, off-the-shelf solutions simply couldn’t support Lego’s goal of uninterrupted play, where smart bricks behave like normal Lego bricks, not electronic components that constantly need to be removed, aligned, or plugged in.
For now, bundled with the three Lego Smart Play Star Wars sets available for pre-order, builders receive a first-generation Lego wireless charger. It supports charging up to two Smart Bricks at a time, in any orientation, and is vaguely reminiscent of Apple’s canceled AirPower concept, although it actually ships.
In this sense, the charger is not just a technical solution. It’s a philosophical question, keeping the technology in the background so that Smart Play always feels like Lego first, and technology second.
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