Tag Archives: EV3

So, you like Raspberry Pi but would prefer to build with LEGO?  No problem!  You can use the Mindsensors PiStorms to add a touch screen, buttons and motor and sensor ports to your Pi.  The designs for the LEGO Technic compatible parts that come with this are completely open source and available for anyone to tweak as they see fit. ...

A little while back, the Lejos forums were getting reports that some of the newly purchased bricks were having issues with Bluetooth connections.  Andy Shaw, one of the main developers of this project, determined that the main cause was a newly updated Bluetooth chipset in this brick.  Unlike its predecessor, this chipset is BT 4.0 capable.  That means that, at least ...

There are many books out there for the budding robotics fan who wants to hone his or her programming skills.  This is a book that fills that need very nicely.  Terry Griffin’s “The Art of LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Programming” is a great No Starch Press publication.  While some books focus on building, others and both building and programming, this one has deep ...

I’ve played around with various vision systems on the MINDSTORMS, even the Pixy Cam, using an adapter.  However, now Charmed Labs have created a version of the super popular Pixy Cam that will work pretty much out of the box with MINDSTORMS. So, what’s different about this version and the standard one? Well, for one it comes with an adapter ...

OpenElectrons are continuing their development of awesome stuff for the RPi.  This new product, the PiStorms is a “shield” for the RPi that allows you to connect up to 4 EV3/NXT motors and up to 4 EV3/NXT sensors.  It has a screen on it and can be programmed using a Python API. The RPi communicates with the PiStorms shield through ...

  ROBOTC 4.32 is here and it includes a few new features and plenty of bug fixes and enhancements. Please note that if you use LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, you must update the Linux Kernel to 1.07X, after which you must update the ROBOTC VM as well, of course. Links for downloading files: ROBOTC 4.32 for MINDSTORMS EV3 and NXT: [LINK] ...

RoboSnap is a a very compact vision system for the RPi and EV3.  It is based on the very popular PixyCam (CMUCam5) but in a much more compact package. Capable of much more than simply recognising colours, RoboSnap can also detect simple shapes like triangles, rectangles, circles.  It can return provide size, location and colour for these objects, as well ...

If you’re an (aspiring) FLL participant or just someone who wants to learn some cool new programming tricks with their EV3, you may be interested in Kyle Markland, a.k.a. Builderdude35’s YouTube channel.  He’s made a whole bunch of very useful videos.  Here are two of them: There are many more: EV3 Robot Design: Building your FLL Robot EV3 Robot Design: ...

This update is mostly a “bug fix” release to take care of a few issues + inclusion of the recently released VEX Cortex Master Firmware Update (4.25).  If you’re still using 4.27, you can see the changelog from 4.27 to 4.29 here.  The 3.65 version is for teams that still using ROBOTC 3.x for their robots. For those of you ...

I was invited by Hakan, a Computer Science teacher at the Metis Montessori Lyceum (a secondary level school), to be a guest speaker at the Metis CoderDojo in Amsterdam last weekend and it was so much fun!  The theme for the day was line following robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS.  I was a little intimidated at first, nothing is scarier than ...