Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#2When I was young I always enjoyed playing with Mindstorms. It was my first experience programming. For me it was amusing that I could build some robot with Lego and make it retrieve a ball from our living room.
Sadly jumping from the block oriented programming to "real" programming of the Hitachi H8 microcontroller was not very straight forward, so I kind of hit a wall in that regard. Maybe this collaboration will act as a better gateway to "real" programming.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#3Wow. This is a pretty big deal.
There have been third party hubs to pilot Lego Technic motors for a while now, but this HAT is a lot cheaper than any of them (TBF it doesn't work the same either, with no battery, button or physical casing etc.), works with the latest batch of motors, has official blessing, and the RPi is also a lot more extensible and flexible on every aspect.
This is a no brainer purchase for anyone trying to do more things with Lego Technic in my opinion.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#4When I was young I always enjoyed playing with Mindstorms. It was my first experience programming. For me it was amusing that I could build some robot with Lego and make it retrieve a ball from our living room. Sadly jumping from the block oriented programming to "real" programming of the Hitachi H8 microcontroller was not very straight forward, so I kind of hit a wall in that regard. Maybe this collaboration will ac…
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, block-based "programming" does allow children/newbies to construct something that works. On the other hand, almost nothing usable is being programmed this way. So I'd say it's more or less fine as a kind of introduction to general rules of programming, but the sooner you get to the actual code, the better.
That said, microcontroller programming is something very specific in the sense that the same thing might (and often is) programmed in a completely different way on another device, so basically a large part is just getting to know your hardware. Fortunately, these days several abstraction layers are available for people who need them, from MicroPython to FreeRTOS.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#5When I was young I always enjoyed playing with Mindstorms. It was my first experience programming. For me it was amusing that I could build some robot with Lego and make it retrieve a ball from our living room. Sadly jumping from the block oriented programming to "real" programming of the Hitachi H8 microcontroller was not very straight forward, so I kind of hit a wall in that regard. Maybe this collaboration will ac…
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, block-based "programming" does allow children/newbies to construct something that works. On the other hand, almost nothing usable is being programmed this way. So I'd say it's more or less fine as a kind of introduction to general rules of programming, but the sooner you get to the actual code, the better. That said, microcontroller programming is something…
I think it's more about teaching kids/newbies to think in a programming way. That can be language agnostic. You're essentially trying to achieve something "complex" using simple instructions. At a basic level that's a great way to learn programming. As the problems get more complex it becomes obvious why paradigms & architectures exist, and your programming skills can improve.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#6The Build HAT is not compatible with LEGO Mindstorms (EV3) because the plug system is different. The Build HAT/SPIKE™ Prime system uses LPF2 plugs whereas the Mindstorms system uses RJ12 plugs.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#7I would have loved this as a kid... And when my son grows up I think we will have a lot of fun building things with this.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#8The Build HAT is not compatible with LEGO Mindstorms (EV3) because the plug system is different. The Build HAT/SPIKE™ Prime system uses LPF2 plugs whereas the Mindstorms system uses RJ12 plugs.
It can't be long, until Lego start to change the brick size.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#9I've been playing around with the Lego and Raspberry pi combination on and off through the years [1], with the goal of building a standalone tracked vehicle (pi on board) that can move around my apartment. There were various ways to do this already, mainly by using off the shelf motor controller boards and later the third party Bluetooth motor bricks. This was all for the old "power functions" system though, Lego has since revamped their lineup with a lot of new parts that all use a different connector. I'm really looking forward to getting one of these.
Re: Raspberry Pi Build HAT – Controls Lego Technic motors and sensors
#10When I was young I always enjoyed playing with Mindstorms. It was my first experience programming. For me it was amusing that I could build some robot with Lego and make it retrieve a ball from our living room. Sadly jumping from the block oriented programming to "real" programming of the Hitachi H8 microcontroller was not very straight forward, so I kind of hit a wall in that regard. Maybe this collaboration will ac…
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, block-based "programming" does allow children/newbies to construct something that works. On the other hand, almost nothing usable is being programmed this way. So I'd say it's more or less fine as a kind of introduction to general rules of programming, but the sooner you get to the actual code, the better. That said, microcontroller programming is something…
I think you should have a look at the projects we have written that support this launch.
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pathways/lego-intro
They're exclusively written in Python, some of them using Bluetooth for remote control, some using pollution APIs to display data and also TensorFlow for image recognition.