MajorAlvega

Hello! My name is Jorge but as my usual nickname was already taken I will be 'Major Alvega'. I'm from Portugal. I am an Electronics Engineer but work as a sysadmin. Wife, 2 kids, 43 summers. Returned from Dark Age almost 2 years ago, I was playing with a Raspberry Pi and though it would be great to use it with LEGO, some months later EV3 was released and... well, the usual fever. My major interests are robotics/automation/education. In LEGO that equals Mindstorms/Technics/WeDO. For me LEGO cannot be static. I'm not a programmer but I've been doing some copy&paste with Mindstorms, Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu. Lately I've been testing a SBrick, hope to show some interesting things in a near future.

if your intention is to use it «as it cames» then go for the NXT, it's a good way to start and somewhat less expensive. But EV3 is much more than just a revised NXT. For me there are 3 novelties in EV3 that make all the difference: - SD card - USB port - full Linux support This summer I discovered ev3dev (Debian for EV3) and have been trying EV3 with almost every USB gadget I have with great sucess: Wi-Fi, wireless gamepad, 8-relay card, audio card, webcam, LEGOcam, Bluetooth 4.0, Wiimote, 1-wire master... It's like having a Raspberry Pi with a shield for sensors and motors, you can do in EV3 almost everything you can in a Linux laptop or a Raspberry (albit slower). So for power users, EV3 is the horse to bet.

Hello. I'm one of the SBrick beta players testers. The SBrick is very good but not that good: you only get 256 steps, not "1000 something steps" :) (and the low range 0..30~40 is somewhat unusable with the motors i've tested) Now what picked my attention in SBrick is that the remote can be in fact ANY modern system with Bluetooth 4.0 in it... I'm current using my Ubuntu laptop but already showed that it's possible to use a Mindstorms EV3 (with a custom OS, ev3dev = Debian for EV3) and between both there is also the mighty Raspberry Pi... and I'm prety sure there will be someone using Arduino, it's just a matter of time. I'm already using a wireless gamepad and a wiimote. If/when SBrick picks up, there will be people using voice recognition, computer vision, bluetooth triangulation... With the new Microsoft Kinect 2 expect great amounts of awsomness!