From Viral Video to The Most Useless LEGO Brick Do Nothing Box

Whether you call it The Most Useless Box Ever, or a Do Nothing Box, it's a rite of passage in some circles.   Here is our story.

Frivolous Engineering's viral video has over 9 million views (almost 10 million).

The instructable on Instructables.com has over 1 million views.

Maker Media's Mark Frauenfelder demonstrated one on The Colbert Report.

Here's our box completed 4/2/14: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r240LfT6ABU

A Do Nothing Box will turn itself off after you turn it on.  It's that simple!  You can purchase a kit for about $60, or you can buy the electronic parts to make your own.  You can purchase a box and cut it up, or you can make your own.

Never the ones to take the easiest path we started with paint sticks and scrap wood, hammers and too-long nails.  We were going to make our box.  Well, that took a while.  In fact, we have a very nice 1/2 box made.

Then we bought the parts listed in step 7 of the instructable.  See anything wrong with this picture?  I think that anyone who has followed this instructable will understand my implication.  It does a very nice job of telling you how to make the Most Useless Box Ever in several different ways all at the same time.

We read the instructable and tried to figure out what to do.  A little soldering, and we had a very nice dead bug (step 9).

More soldering, more playing, more doing stuff and we decided it wasn't a good idea to jump in like that, especially because it didn't work.  We sat down to think about what the box actually did.  Electrically, that is.

Luckily for us we now had all the parts needed for step 5 of the instructable.  In fact, we had more parts than we needed.

And somehow, now the box is made.

Hey, it wasn't anything I did.  Trust a kid to come up with the simplest solution to any problem... and he wasn't following the instructable!  We fielded questions like...  "Is there a way to only let the electricity go one way in the wire?"

I asked him if he wanted to make a box.  He said that he just wanted to get the inside working first.  Oh yeah, good idea that!

It was his idea to use LEGO bricks for the task.  I questioned the wisdom of that particular idea, especially if you consider that they were my bricks being used.  We had a hairy moment or two when the motor slipped out of its fragile chassis. 

The wires are just plugged in (not soldered), so they'll sometimes slip out.  Eventually, after a few executions, the box will break apart... Hey, it adds to the fun and interest of every execution!  It would be boring if it worked every time!

Enjoy the videos!  I've told the kid that it'll take a year, but this one will get 100K views.  And when that happens, I'll take him to dinner!

Help a deserving kid get a free meal Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r240LfT6ABU

Here's the longer version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyRJhm-nN_c

Here's the one I saw at the Riverside Robot Expo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCLozfkj7ho

Trish Tsoiasue is being mentored by youth who come up with ideas for projects, then they figure out the solutions and let her think she is helping them.  As a result, she ends up learning a whole bunch of non-specific (dare we say random?) things.  Warning: Sometimes the projects take months to complete... but it feels so good when it works!