[EV3] Develop on Raspberry Pi

[DrJB]

I've been wanting to setup a dedicated home computer for my EV3/NXT bricks, and with the cheap (and small foot-print) RPI, this sounds very appealing. Now, after some googling I found ev3dev but my understanding is that it's a whole different development environment. I ultimately want the same EV3 environment as that on a windows machine.

Anyone knows how to achieve this or if anything is in the works?

[MajorAlvega]

"something" is in the works, but it will take a while... if ever.

The ev3dev project is now much more than "only" an operating system.

And it is not only for the EV3, as you found out it can also run on Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone - I use the Raspberry Pi with the BrickPi add-on so I can use some NXT/EV3 sensors and motors.

One of the thing they're doing is trying to bring something similar to the EV3 environment to run over the operating system.

The lms2012-compat, a subproject of the ev3dev, tries to achieve compatibility with the original EV3 software. That would allow us to develop in something like RobotC or LabView.

The project is open source and the community is still small. Every help is welcome.

[JopieK]

It should work and should not be that difficult even to create a HAT for the Pi that is EV3 or NXT compatible (http://www.smashingrobotics.com/brickpi-control-lego-mindstorms-robots-raspberry-pi/). The sensors and motors are connected using i2c and the Pi has i2c interfaces so not that difficult. One could even control it using Bluetooth of course from the Pi.

[MajorAlvega]

@JopieK few EV3 sensors are I2C, most are UART (http://www.ev3dev.org/docs/sensors/)

But that's great because it allows us to use them in any linux system (not just the Pi, see this post)

because the ev3dev project released the drivers as a standalone linux package. So as long as you can connect WeDo/NXT/EV3 devices to your computer, you can use them.

WeDo is easy (USB), EV3 UART require a FTDI cable and NXT I2C devices require a I2C adapter.

BrickPi is similar to your HAT idea - it's not an HAT, just an add-on board (with an ATMEL inside) that uses the Pi UART and a few other pins.

Unfortunately that also means that firmware is needed and the BrickPi firmware doesn't support all NXT/EV3 devices. I've used some touch sensors, the NXT ultrasonic sensor and the NXT motors.

[JopieK]

Great, I didn't know that! But you don't even need Linux for that, every typical microcontroller system will support both UART and i2c of course. Using the Pi UART is not a smart idea however since it will block the basic terminal as far as I know. Makes sense to use a microcontroller at the extension, that is how I do it for other applications (we even use two microcontrollers on one HAT), what would make it a HAT is using a little piece of eeprom and follow some design rules. The idea behind the Pi is not really connecting hardware, but providing a nice embedded and easily usable embedded system with a light weight, versatile operating system, for the hardware it is better to use Arduino-like stuff and then to get best of both worlds, combine them together.