MajorAlvega

As we say in Portugal, a little bird told me, this morning ;) I think it's a sign of good will and also an experiment - LEGO is probably keepin attention to reactions and if people use it (and people will use it ;) then will probably add more details, maybe even a sort of SDK. By the way, LEGO App for BOOST now has an integration with LEGO LIFE App and it is now possible to share projects with other friends (almost) all over the world. And Powered Up items on LEGO Shop are expected soon (or already?) so things are "gaining momentum".

You will like to know that LEGO made the specs of the LWP (LEGO Wireless Protocol) publicly available at github: https://github.com/LEGO/lego-ble-wireless-protocol-docs It's a very good sign that LEGO is using github (not because of github itself but because of open source as a whole - MIT license was adopted for this docs). And thanks for naming me, I really like that "I could only see that far because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants" quote since I read it once on a Carl Sagan book, lots of people before us made this possible.

So like this ? Yes, 5 MP is more than enough for facial recognition and the CSI connection has lots of bandwidth (but you really just need a single shot for facial recognition, unless you want to track someone in realtime). Usually night vision cameras aren't good for daylight pictures but for AI it really doesn't matter.

Can't follow the link but a few years ago the Raspberry Pi magazine had a project of a security lock with a RPi and the RPi camera, opening the lock with the face in real time. A regular USB webcam will work fine with the RPi, you don't need super bandwidth nor resolution for face recognition. Like Logitech C170/C270.

Missed these last posts. That rechargeable battery pack is interesting, not sure of output current limits in 9V and 12V modes (some chinese products lie on their specs and some don't even have any kind of protection). For that "monstruosity" you probably need several battery packs. Motors draw lots of current, the TFT also draws some, latests RPis at full CPU usage add a few 100 mA's... not sure if one single battery pack can deliver all that current from the internal LiPo batteries without overheating.

Current version, I believe. But don't try to make the image processing on the EV3, use a RPi - some 2 years ago I installed the (then) current release of OpenCV and made some face recognition... it took 4 minutes on the EV3 (or more, not sure now). To follow people with just the EV3 processor you need to offload the processing, like using a Pixycam or a smartphone or "the cloud". Or forget image at all and use something else like sound or temperature or even an iBeacon.

Oh, the new MINDSTORMS with an 8-core Raspberry Pi inside, 1 TB of RAM and Bluetooth 5 and 5G :D :D :D Everybody is talking about it but I wouldn't put much hope on it yet... probably Technic will get revamped first, with some Powered Up new devices, and then we will might start dreaming on the successor of the EV3.

So I got my first addition to the diorama, a First Order AT-ST. The idea is making it turn the head when the Conveyex passes by. And since the set doesn't have a turret head I could make one big enough to hide a motor, a battery and a remote controller. After several attempts (both PF IR and Powered Up, several motors and batteries) I chose Powered Up. I don't have the right parts (never have!) but I managed to make a big and ugly head: it's not final yet but the main goal is achieved - it holds still while rotating the head. So a team of Penguin commandos from the Dark Side is now controlling the AT-ST and assuring no damn rebel Porg is going to pass: the bad news: my kids keep asking why the legs don't move. the good news: if I rebuild the legs the head will not look so big. the very bad news: when batteries are drained its a pain to replace them. Will have to make a rechargeable battery and hide a recharging plug somewhare (so much for LEGO only parts).

Fantastique!!! like others already said, the way it catches the rope is very ingenious.

It was a great idea to emancipate Robotics from Technic. Not much active users yet but at least one seems very happy :)

Since you are into MQTT you might like this project: David Lechner made a micro-python program for Jason' telegraph and printer, using test.mosquitto.org (or any other broker you want) so several EV3 telegraphs can talk all over the world. I added two bash scripts to allow use a text console if you don't have a telegraph. I still have my telegraph assembled somewhere (used on PLUG exhibition some months ago, kids like to test morse code on it) so if you decide to give it a try just send me a note.

test.mosquitto.org may fail sometimes, they don't offer SLA's. But I really never had problems, perhaps you are using topics with spaces and missing the quotes? you can also use your own mosquitto broker (laptop or even ev3dev itself, is very light). I use on my laptop, this way don't need to ask my networking team to open MQTT port on the corporate firewall. paho-mqtt is good if you want to use python for MQTT - I've been using mostly bash scripts so mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub are enough but when things get more complicated and bash isn't enough I use paho-mqtt (not very often... I'm still learning python).

That's the spirit!!! :D

For debugging problems please install Nordic nRF Connect App and put it in SCAN mode, it should show your BOOST Hub and you should succeed connecting through it. If not, there is some hardware or software problem on your Android preventing you from connecting to the BOOT Hub.

ROS keeps appearing on my checklist, I guess one of these days I'll have to try it. There is some work with ROS and ev3dev: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/EV3 For professional reasons I'm much more biased to Google API than AWS or Azure but hey, why not?

Nice. Yes, the idea of buying a 4DBrix was having some immediately usable device. For people with Arduino or other microcontroller platforms experience, it's something we can do on our own for more or less the same price (and more fun :) ) but most AFOLs would prefer something like the 4DBrix (or the SBrick, BuWizz, etc). 4DBrix also have a nice GUI program to use it, nControl, and I believe that's where they score extra points - you can design your own railway (or monorail) project and then control the train with this Wi-Fi controller and the fixed circuits through USB controllers. For pure Train AFOL's that's great.

Excellent work. I keep amazing with NXT being able to do such amazing things.

This was one of those crazy ideas we have when are discussing with other LUG fellows. This guy from PLUG defied me to show a LEGO robot that translates conversation, much like the C3PO protocol droid from Star Wars. As usual, he wasn't really expecting ti could be possible with LEGO. I only had a couple of hours so I decided to copy a Raspsberry Pi approach of using “the Cloud”. Google offers a one year free trial so I registered and tried a few examples on my Ubuntu laptop, amazing what one can do with just a few curl commands! I wrote a sort of short tutorial. It is now obsolete but helps showing the way for further attempts. I used an USB microphone because I assumed there was no LEGO microphones. But there is - the LEGOCam (MINDSTORMS RCX Vision) has an embedded mic, sound quality isn't great but might (big might) be used - that would make a 100% LEGO hardware solution. By that time I had problems with initial authentication times - it took almost a minute before I can start using the Google services and it needed to be renewed after an hour. EV3 CPU is slow but probably not the only reason here so one of these days I might try it again. Of course, using a Raspberry Pi and a BrickPi would give much better results.

I think you are the guy I need for some crazy ideas I might start later... One year ago I tested Google API with ev3dev and got some interesting results. It was a one year trial license that already expired but I might try it again. The only real problem I had was authentication times taking too long before I can start using Google services from my EV3 (I didn't try BrickPi... perhaps its time to return).

You're welcome. Open source usually gives a good community experience and I started using ev3dev also because of that - people answered most of my questions and Google also helped (being based on Debian, some questions are answered in Raspberry Pi or Ubuntu forums and blogs). Your experience is also good for the project - it shows to others that it is not so scaring and also helps finding things that can or need to be improved. Of course I'm also interested on your progress - since I'm not a programmer I will most probably learn something following this thread.

I think this helps: https://github.com/ev3dev/ev3dev-lang-python/issues/525 An issue is open that will make things easier soon: https://github.com/ev3dev/ev3dev-lang-python/issues/527

You will have to wait for @dwalton76 to answer... I'm just a googler wise-guy, not a real programmer :)

not sure but I think the last import should be from ev3dev2.led import Leds And for visual browsing the file system I think WinSCP does that, it's like Filezilla but uses SSH instead of FTP. I'm not sure but I think Filezilla also suports SSH but never used for that.

An ESP8266-based module. You can use it like an Arduino, even use the Arduino IDE and libraries. It should also have a power driver, probably an H-bridge and some sort of power regulator. The PF connector only exposes C1 and C2 pins, not 9V and GND. So it's not possible to use a PF Servo Motor. Everything else (9V and PF) should work.

I got my hands on a 4DBrix Wi-Fi Controller: It's intended to control LEGO trains through Wi-Fi but it got my attention when I knew it uses MQTT messages. I'm a big fan of MQTT, a light message queing protocol developed by IBM to control satellites in the last century and then released to the community. There are tools to use MQTT in all major operating systems and also on some microcontrollers like Arduino so we can create a mesh of very heterogeneous devices including Arduino, Raspberry Pi... and MINDSTORMS EV3: So in case someone needs to control a LEGO motor and Bluetooth or Infrared is not an option you can also use Wi-Fi. MQTT is an asynchronous protocol to exchange messages. There is a 'broker' that receives messages from 'publishers' and delivers them to 'subscribers' and there is a sort of 'namespace' to organize all this messages in 'topics' In the video I used a fresh installation of current snapshot version of ev3dev 'stretch'. It already includes the tools to 'publish' and 'subscribe' MQTT messages. The 'broker' is my laptop and the 4DBrix had subscribed a topic named 'nControl/one'. So when I type the command mosquitto_pub -h 10.24.10.121 -t nControl/one -m "mot,f,1023" i am publishing a message on the broker (my laptop, 10.24.10.121) on the topic that 4DBrix Wi-Fi Controller has subscribed. The payload of the message is "mot,f,1023" and the Controller interprets this a "turn motor ON, forward, at full power". it is really simple. The only problem i have so far is with the connection to my wireless acces point, sometimes it takes A LOT of time. With just a PF 1.0 connector it isn't exactly a competitor for SBrick, BuWizz or LEGO Powered Up. And for €32 anyone familiar with Arduino and ESP can make their own. But it's always good to have an option.