In celebration of the Halo 4 release today, my nephew Andy Pescovitz completed his Spartan Warrior-4 custom LEGO minifig. See more of Andy's insanely-intricate custom LEGO characters from Gears of War, Modern Warfare 2, Max Payne, and other videogames at his pescovam Flickr stream.

Here are some examples of projects from the Unofficial Lego Technic Builder's Guide. I'm surprised by the complexity of the vehicles and robots that you can build with these components. (And how could anyone resist the far-out soundtrack that accompanies the trailer?)

Legohaulic made these wonderful custom LEGO Star Wars characters for Creations For Charity (site currently down), which raises money to buy LEGO sets for disadvantaged children.

Our friends at Laughing Squid have lots of photos of this great Lego build of the Batcave. I like the dramatic lighting. Incredible LEGO Batcave Built Out of Over 20,000 Pieces

[Video Link] Fiona Chan says:

Last night, LEGO kicked off the countdown to the Halloween season by inviting the New Orleans community to build a 12-foot tall LEGO vampire by the light of the full moon in the company’s first ever all night build. Set against the backdrop of Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral, they built spooky Lego Lord Vampyre -- based on the lead villain from the new Monster Fighters line.

Akiyuky on YouTube has uploaded a 7 minuted video overview of her or his astounding Lego Ball Contraption, a robotic rube goldberg device in 17 modules, each more fiendishly clever than the last. The accompanying blog (in Japanese) has lots more detail. But honestly, you can just sit agog for seven glorious minutes and soak it all up without having to try and parse out Google Translate's rendition of Akiyuky's explanation.

LEGO TECHNICからくり部屋 (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

A team of computer scientists at the University of Southampton in the UK created a supercomputer out of 64 Raspberry Pi matchbox Linux-on-a-chip computers and Lego. The team included six year old James Cox, the son of project lead Professor Simon Cox, "who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing."

Here's a PDF with instructions for making your own Raspberry Pi/Lego supercomputer.

Professor Cox comments: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.”

The racking was built using Lego with a design developed by Simon and James, who has also been testing the Raspberry Pi by programming it using free computer programming software Python and Scratch over the summer. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi). Professor Cox uses the free plug-in ‘Python Tools for Visual Studio’ to develop code for the Raspberry Pi.

Professor Cox adds: “The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

Engineers Build Supercomputer Using Raspberry Pi, Lego [Parity News]

Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer [Press release]

(Images: Simon J Cox 2012)

Drew sez, "Lego has released a Haunted House set with vampire figures, zombie chef, Frankenstein butler, and glow in the dark ghosts. It's not a traditional Lego set as it's made to look in a state of disrepair with cracked windows, crumbling foundation and broken shutters. 2000 pieces make it a substantial build intended for older, more advanced builders."

Above is Jason Forthofer Brick Show review of the 2000+ piece set.

Lego Monster Fighter Haunted House (Thanks, Drew!)

Movoto created a fun calculator that figures out how many Legos it would take to build your house.