Tcm0

It does have absolute position encoding. Sorry :D I've seen people saying that seriously so better be sure.

The new SPIKE Essentials kit that will be released next month will contain a "small angular motor". But I suppose that it will be about the size of the M-Motor, so not really smaller, just with more features. Wouldn't chinese products support 7 steps per direction if they came from the same factory? The motors etc have different characteristics, so pretty unlikely. I bought the cada pro power system recently and the included leds are very dark compared to the lego ones (but they also take less energy).

First it will probably only work with the SPIKE software but I expect lego to add support for it to mindstorms RI and powered up later. You can probably use them with python and mindstorms when they come out. Yep you'd be limited to the round hole. You could even make "animations" with turn signals and stuff like that.

I think that you could use technic plates and then attach something to the plates

Yeah PUP, PF etc are beeing called 9V but it's not that simple. 9V is the output voltage of 6 AA batteries (6x1.5V=9V). If you use rechargeable batteries instead, they are rated 1.2V (6x1.2V=7.2V). But actually batteries drop in voltage when they are beeing discharged. So the actual voltage of a AA battery isn't 1.5V. It can be something between like 1.7V when it's new and 1V if it's older. Then we have lithium-type batteries. The output voltage of the cells depends on the elements used. For normal lithium batteries, the output voltage is around 3.7V (equal to the output of the wedo 2.0 rechargeable battery - what a surprise). Lego simply uses 2 of these cells in a row (2x3.7V=7.4V) to get "close" to 9V. And then we have WeDo. The first WeDo set came with a USB connector but USB only supplies 5V. I think that lego decided that 5V is enough for school projects. The motors are a bit slower etc. but it's enough for M-Motors in models that don't need much torque. Another factor might be that the sensors don't need 9V (but I don't know much about wedo 1.0 sensors). They stayed with 5V for the motors for WeDo 2.0, the powered up sensors can be used with up to 3.3V. The wedo 2.0 hub can be powered with 2AA batteries thanks to the lower voltage (instead of 6 batteries; 2x1.5V=3V) and is smaller than the city hub but the voltage has to be boosted for the motors. I would be surprised if the motor was actually that small. We have the large and the medium angular motor. I guess that the small angular motor will be around the size of the M-Motor (the simple linear motor). By the way: I think that the part about the gyro sensor is an error in the translation and simply wrong. Gyro sensors aren't precise enough for angular motors.

The WeDo 2.0 battery has a voltage output of 3.7V. The hub boosts it to 5V for the motors. The new battery is 7.3V. I fear that it will be M-size if we consider the successfull naming of the PUP parts so far.

I think that it's because lego finally dropped 32 bit support for the PUP app. They announced it a while ago. While the CPU of the device might support x64 instructions, sometimes the OS is compiled as a 32 bit version and that wouldn't work. A workaround might be to use a custom rom (but not all devices are supported etc).

They kinda did that with the old crocodile from 2007. Idk. The double switch track was made for just one set, too (and was discontinued pretty fast).

I don't think that we will see single cars for the crocodile. It's primarily a "display" model that looks great by itself. Additional cars don't really fit into that. Also, lego wasn't successful when they sold individual cars (there was a big pack with the santa fe + cars that was highly reduced in the past). lego probably wanted to check how successful the crocodile is first (and it was successful I think... at least it was sold out for months). Development of a new set takes too long to release something directly after it. But I'm sure that we'll see new locos and maybe cars at some point in the future.

It wasn't a 7 year gap. The horizon express came in 2013 and the winter holiday train in 2016, so only 3 and 4 years. Yeah I know that the community doesn't see the winter holiday train as creator expert but it was labeled as that so it counted as one for lego.

There is a list on lego.com but it's pretty short when it comes to android: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/device-guide/powered-up

Can you post pictures of the program and the model?

There are 3 options. 1. Touchscreen buttons in the app, 2. game controllers and 3. the powered up remote. 1. The reaction time is decent and you have many options to customize your controls. Not really good for PCs without touchscreen. 2. Many different sticks etc to control the mindstorms. But has a bit of a delay because it's not a direct connection. It's controller <-> pc/smartphone <-> hub 3. Only works with python and a 3rd party library that enables it. It's direct, so it's pretty fast but you can't customize much.

I think that the powered up app actually has a block to control the ramp up and ramp down time for the motors with speed sensors. But yeah, the crocodile has a good amount of torque. There is the keybrick one but we all wait for the next batch which was announcend months ago.

The bluebrixx electronics in general have a quality problem and the servo motors don't work properly. At least the first batch didn't work properly. You can find reviews etc on youtube.

It's really not a big deal. You can put one row of bricks below the station and everything is fine, including the height of the station. It's designed to be used without tracks but it can be easily adapted to be used with tracks. It's hard to argue with the "golden age" but I think that the current time is very good, too. We don't have dedicated motorized switch tracks or signals but we have everything to build them. There are instructions for relieable switch tracks and signals can be built easily, too. That's my perspective on the technical side. The actual train models are another topic that highly depends on personal preferences, age etc.

From what I've heard it was because of a part that was produced in only one factory that was closed during some lockdown last year. So they had a massive production backlash. And I think that we've got many trains in the past few years, maybe more than we got for a long time. We have 2 city trains, the disney train, the crocodile, the hogwarts express, the 30 year anniversary train and there was the hidden side train with a new track piece. LEGO mainly shifted from selling everything individually (my own train etc) to selling complete bundles. The train station in the disney train set is massive and kings cross isn't small either. We have crossings in both of the city trains. I think that it's a misconception that lego doesn't care about trains. They mainly sell complete packages and not single pieces.

There is also the BLE hub2hub lib: https://hubmodule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hub2hub/

He basically said "I can't tell you much about them because they are none of my affiliates". And he didn't mentioned the german distributer jb spielwaren (which would be important for german customers)

Yes I thought that it worked and I retested but it didn't work well. It still works if you can trick the spike software to use the ri firmware. It seems to be a firmware issue. But yeah, not a good way.

Yep that sounds right. It simply doesn't make sense to set the speed of motors without a speed sensor.

Nope it works with the train motor, the lights and the other ones as well. You have to add the additional motor blocks to the program and use power, not speed. At least with the robot inventor software. The spike software seems like it doesn't like that.

The motors do work with scratch

Both hubs work with all of the powered up and control+ motors. You are mostly right for the sensors tho. (You can use all of the sensors in python but not in the scratch environment)

EV3 will be discontinued this summer, so SPIKE and RI replace EV3.