The Lego Smart Brick teardown
Lego Smart Bricks sit at the heart of Lego’s Smart Play System, which uses sensors, lights, and sounds to add interactivity to play. The Smart Play system was announced at CES 2026 and was one my personal highlights of the show. I got some play time on Luke’s “Red Five” X-Wing and was impressed by the feature set of the brick given its small size and battery. The bricks brought me back to childhood, when I’d spend hours upon hours building and playing with new sets. If I were a kid, I’d be stoked to play with these!
At CES, Lego launched three sets with the Smart Play capability with shipping beginning on March 1. I signed up for the pre-orders as soon as I found out and knew, going in, that a teardown was in the books. After all, the Lego Group is well known for their outstanding engineering and manufacturing processes. I expected a similar level of detailed engineering effort went into these bricks and was eager to check out internals.
The Smart Play System consists of Smart Bricks, Smart Tags, and Smart Minifigures. The tags and minifigures are passive devices that trigger interactive responses when in close proximity with the brick. The bricks are the brains of this system, and include a tiny PCBA-powered from a Li-ion battery. The bricks are charged wirelessly using the included Smart Charger. Lego claims that the bricks provide up to 45 minutes of play time after a 3-hour charge.
The SMART Bricks, Tags, and Minifigures are fully backward compatible with all existing Lego sets. At the time of writing, Lego isn’t directly selling the Smart Play platform — you need to buy one of the Smart Play All-In-One sets to receive the tags, bricks, and minifigures. After you’ve bought the Smart Play accessories, you can combine them with the Smart Play Compatible sets to enable the full play experience.
I bought one of each: the Throne Room Duel and A-Wing all-in-one set and the Luke’s Landspeeder Compatible set. So far, I’ve built up the A-Wing shown here and am working on the Throne Room set.
Then I proceeded to take apart a Smart Brick for this teardown. Inside I found clever design choices, some surprises, and a mystery or two. I even did a side-by-side comparison of Smart Minifigures versus classic ones and peeked inside a Smart Tag. Give it a read at the link below and let me know what you think.
And to read more about the amazing work electrical engineer and informal community member Utsav Gupta is doing in the realm of tiny, wearable medical supplies, check out our interview with him from last month.
Informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware and hardtech. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market, informal has the perfect collection of people for the job.