Lego Robotics at Brick Cascades

We have been working with the Lego EV3 robot and the Raspberry Pi to learn more about programming and electronic circuits.  We took our creation to the Brick Cascades Lego convention in Portland Oregon, where we met all sorts of great people.

With the almost 10000 people who came to see the public exhibition, plus the over 200 attendees of the Lego convention, of course we met quite a few Lego fans.  Among folks who appreciate Lego, you will find many who are also interested in how to inspire kids to learn building, engineering, and otherwise making cool and useful things. This audience was quite interested in our Raspberry Pi Lego robotics project.

We met some people who own a Raspberry Pi, but have not yet taken it out of the box.  We talked to others who have never heard of the Raspberry Pi.  We even met a few industrious young makers who have done complex and useful projects with their Pi that make our simple Lego robot demonstration look like child’s play (which it was, being built out of Lego after all).

In the end, we made some new friends, inspired others to break their Pi out of the box and get started with something simple, and told dozens of people who have never heard of the Raspberry Pi about how easy and accessible programming and physical computing can be.  We also learned some new ideas to inspire us for our next project.

Because we worked our tails off getting this display ready, we wanted to share a some details, and maybe even inspire a few more to start making something interesting or even useful.

Our display included a Lego EV3 robot, with our EV3 Control Panel software running on the Raspberry Pi.  The Pi acts as a Wi-Fi hot spot to connect the EV3 and another remote terminal to the same local network, so we did not have to rely on convention center Wi-Fi.

We wired up a bunch of simple circuits so the robot’s sensors would light up different LEDs. We used patterns to demonstrate the different modes for each sensor.

The color sensor in color mode lights up the matching light on the top array.  In ambient or reflective mode it lights some number of lights depending on the intensity of the reading.

The IR sensor in proximity mode turns on a number of LEDs proportional the reading.  In seek mode, it shows you the direction to the remote target.

The touch sensor has a simple on / off response.

It was great to see people respond to the light show, and a perfect way to demonstrate that programming and physical computing are accessible and affordable.

Of course, the little kids also want to see the robot smash something, so we had fun driving it over the color towers we built for the demonstration.  Thankfully, it is all made out of Lego so we could put it back together and do it all again.

All too soon, it seemed, it was time to pack up the robot and head home.

We had such a good time this year,  we are already thinking about what we can build to show off next year.  See you at Brick Cascades 2017.