Uli Kilian

In 2011, Uli Kilian earned a Guinness World Record for solving 100 Rubik's cubes during that year's London marathon. Instead of running during this year's race, however, he has produced a Lego Technics robot that plays free-to-play iPad games while he sleeps.

The game in question is Jurassic Park Builder -- a free-to-play iPad title that requires you check in every few minutes to tap on dinosaurs and earn in-game currency, or repeatedly cough up real-world cash instead. "It's a really nice game with nice graphics," says Kilian, a senior art director at UK-based medical animation studio Random 42. "But I thought you could easily automate the tapping."


The small setup uses an old iPad mounted on top of Technics wheels. The machine is powered by an Arduino board and connects to a Windows laptop. The result is that throughout the night the machine moves the iPad back and forth underneath a nodding donkey-style tapping mechanism, which, when wrapped in tin foil and wired to the ground pin of an Arduino, tricks the iPad's capacitive touchscreen into thinking it's a human finger.

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"The last time I did anything with Lego was when I was eight, and I've never done anything with Technic," Kilian admits, highlighting that it wouldn't be a difficult project for someone else to replicate. "I heard about the [Arduino] boards two weeks before and I knew I was going on holiday. I'm a 3D artist so all the stuff I do is virtual and I really wanted to do something in the real world, and I'd never done anything with micro-controllers before."

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Uli Kilian

In the game, the dinosaurs have different time periods during which they give money back. The more regularly you load it up and tap the dinosaur, the more you earn. "One [dino] is after five minutes -- you tap him and get points," Kilian explains. "Another is every ten minutes; another every 15 minutes, and so on. But you might want to sleep. At that time, that's when the automation kicks in."


Kilian said the whole loop of tapping between 11 dinosaurs takes exactly five minutes, then it goes back to the start and repeats the process. "I put all the dinosaurs in one line [in the game's virtual park landscape] and then set the distance between them equally so the arm can move between them easily."

This allowed Kilian to earn the maximum amount of in-game currency the game requires, without having to manually check in -- or keep spending real-world cash.

What's next then for the Technics robot? "The trouble is I don't have very much time," Kilian says. "I have a baby boy at home and a great job doing 3D stuff. I have many ideas of how to make it better. The first would be to get it working in more directions, and make it quicker."