Mr Hobbles

Where do you see the info about the lights?

@Lok24It’s only possible to do so this Android. iOS doesn’t provide the same filesystem access, and Lego hasn’t provided a way of doing this yet.

You basically have two options: 1. Plug both motors into the same port on both hubs (port A or B). This way the respective buttons on the remote (left or right) control both motors at the same time. But because one locomotive is turned around, the motors will run in opposite directions. So you need to put the motor at the other side of the locomotive and turn it around, and make the required modification to the underside. 2. Plug both motors into different ports. This way you can run one in front and one in reverse. But you need to press both buttons on the remote at the same time as covered in page 1 of this topic.

That would work, yes, you can connect two hubs to one remote directly. You just have to make sure the motors are both running in the same direction, which as @ps1flyer says, means using the other bogey and moving the underside a bit, but nothing major.

@9v brick master I would temper your expectations a little bit. Lego tends to work in 2-3 year cycles. They probably already have a new train starting in design, which in itself can take 6-24 months of design process. I would imagine they will use the next year or two to determine of sales of this locomotive are enough to warrant the release of that new train, or whether it disappears into the abyss. I wouldn't expect any more electronics components for switches or signals, those are really expensive to produce. Buildings, maybe, but I think the point of this new line is that it doesn't just appeal to train fans - it appeals to non-train fan adults who want a display piece on their shelf. Remember, AFOL trains are/were on life support - this is likely a test to to determine if they can make more than one every 4-7 years!

Unfortunately you still need the app and code running while you're using the remote controller for the Horizon Express with my solution. :( Unless you have a second phone/tablet you won't be able to give it to your kid. A second controller is probably easiest. Horizon Express - 2x hubs, 1x phone/tablet with app, 1x remote control. 60198 - 1x hub, 1x remote control.

It works exactly the same way. :) I don't have a recommended seller, I tend to go whereever is cheapest.

I did not know about the existence of that block, thanks! That simplifies it greatly! @Detroit-Funk Here's an updated, much simpler version, thanks to @Gimmick's tip:

Aha. The red section you have highlighted is the block for "change the LED on top of the hub". The green section you have highlighted is used to select which hub - in this case, hub 01. The unmarked part chooses the color - purple. The other two purple blocks do exactly the same for hubs 02 and 03 - the second locomotive hub, and the remote.

Are you referring to the screenshot? Those aren't technic hubs - that's just the generic icon for a "hub". The first purple code section turns the indicator LED's on all hubs purple. So you know that they are all together. You can make this any color you like or delete the section all together. The hubs will just be white. The second purple code section is responsible for turning the head/tail lights on. If you don't want to run head/tail lights, delete the whole purple section at the top right.

@Detroit-FunkI've uploaded a video for you here. :) (Please excuse the dog walking around, she was very curious...) For my setup, you need 2x Powered Up hubs, 2x train motors, and 2x LED lights. On the back locomotive I've made the tail lights red instead of clear. 1. Create a new coding project. 2. Create the program as per my screenshot. 3. Connect all hubs and remote. 4. Press Play. 5. Drive train with remote!

@Detroit-Funk Using the Bluetooth icon at the top left of the screen, you can connect multiple hubs. 1. Connect Hub 1 (front locomotive) 2. Connect Hub 2 (back locomotive) 3. Connect Hub 3 (The remote control). Once all connected, click the big green "Play" button at the top right. Now you can use the remote control to control both locomotives. :)

There is no controller layout. :) You connect the physical Powered Up remote control and use that in exactly the same way as other trains - speed up, speed down, emergency stop.

This my solution for this. It's a Powered Up app program that allows you to use the normal Powered Up remote control buttons (up/down/stop) in exactly the same fashion with two hubs (ie. the Horizon Express). It assumes 1) There's a hub in both the front and the back locomotives, 2) The train motors are plugged into port A on both hubs, and 3) There are LED lights plugged into port B on both hubs, for both head and tail lights. The hubs should be connected as: Front locomotive hub as Hub 1, back locomotive hub as Hub 2, and Powered Up remote control as Hub 3. It looks complex, but it includes button debouncing functionality which ensures that a single button press only increases by one speed step, instead of accidental double increases. EDIT: OUT OF DATE! SIMPLER VERSION ON NEXT PAGE!

I'm so hyped for this thing. It's been ages since we got an adult train. I'm in for two. :) I think regardless of reception now, 10 years down the line it'll be a long sought after model for train fans who didn't pick it up while it was out. Along with the Emerald Night. I'm reading one of the interviews with Jamie Berard here, and this quote stands out: I'm picking out this: "For us, it really spoke to that rebirth of us getting back into trains–that we’re starting with an icon in the train world that has so much history behind it." I really do hope this sells well enough that they can continue to "get back into trains". :)

There is a file system, using MicroPython you can write to files. I don’t think the space is that big though, possibly just a few MB’s - there’s no microSD expansion slot either.

You hit most of them, but here's my take: 1. The replacement of a screen with a 5x5 matrix. The screen was useful in a lot of MOC's - many people put it to good use. 2. The lack of a USB port other than for charging. EV3 supported WiFi natively by plugging in a supported USB WiFi adapter. WiFi enabled robots to be controlled by network devices. 3. microSD card slot, and the ability to boot an OS from a microSD card, enabled the community to create their own Linux based OS's such as ev3dev. LEGO even provided a few alternatives of their own. 4. In doing so, the USB port could be used to connect to almost every device imaginable. It became a mini PC - many people used it as an official Raspberry Pi alternative (albeit slower). 5. The use of the Powered Up connector really is great, the unification of the various electronics standards has been a long time coming. Really, this has been my wish for a long time. But it's come at the expense of two ports. Even if they are all I/O now, many competition robots used all 7 or 8 ports to drive motors and sensors (Check out WRO robots if you're curious). Much like my post above though, this is all dependent on your use cases. I imagine its fine for classrooms with the set curriculum, but the EV3 really became popular with the more advanced section of the Mindstorms community, it really did almost compete with the Raspberry Pi in many scenarios. Of course, there are other advantages as you say - better battery, smaller size, etc, but it comes at the expense of the hackability that LEGO themselves enabled. Here's a simple example - an EV3, with the official LEGO USB camera from Vision Command plugged in, taking a picture and sending it to a printer over WiFi. I like SPIKE Prime and the new Mindstorms as a standalone product, but its a step down from EV3 in the kinds of applications that can be achieved.

I don't teach in education (though I tried for a little bit) so I may not be fully versed in what the challenges are, but I guess I'm a little clear on how this "confusion" affects those teaching these things? From my potentially naive point of view, you have a class of 20 students, so you buy a handful of SPIKE Prime (or Mindstorms) kits. It comes with motors, sensors, hubs, various LEGO elements, and a fully featured app available on multiple platforms (iOS/Android/Windows/macOS/etc), which as well as having graphical and textual programming interfaces, comes with hundreds of classroom lessons you can teach your students. I'd imagine most classrooms wouldn't venture far outside of that safe zone, potentially further investing in the official SPIKE Prime expansion set, or maybe buying a handful of extra SPIKE Prime motors and sensors. Similarly for the consumer - you buy a train, it comes with all the electronics required. You buy the new Haunted House, and the instruction manual comes with clear instructions about which motors you need to buy and how to download the app. On the other hand the stuff we do here is very technical, intended to get the most out of our elements, unlocking the full potential of the entire system, and building third party applications and libraries before LEGO can because we're too impatient to wait. :) Its not stuff the average consumer cares about. You don't need to know any of it to drive your Powered Up lego train, and you don't need to know of any of it to buy motors youre told to buy and download the app from the location you're told to download it from. People don't like change, and by their nature, people are impatient and non-forward looking. Even Power Functions took 5+ years before all the components were available that could rival 9v - people were very unhappy for a long time, especially the train crowd. You just have to read the Hobby Train threads and some of the linked LUGnet posts from 2006 to see just how much people hated the idea of giving up their precious metal tracks and embracing the battery box. I read some of the LUGnet posts yesterday - "RC and IR is too complicated for children!" was a comment that stuck out. How times change. One of my main passions as a software engineer is automation. In my day-to-day job when not writing code, I need to automate everything from build processes to server deployments across fleets of thousands of servers. That's not a boast, every job has complexity. I tried my hand at teaching university students for a couple of years. I don't envy those that do it. But automation is never simple and by its nature complex, so if you really want to get the most out of any complex system you need to get "down and dirty", so to speak. My point being, I'm not one that shies away from complexity. Yet from my point of view 9v was an incredibly complex system. Tens of different motor types all with different performance characteristics, some of them looking identical to each other! Without the work of @Philo I would not know which to use for what purpose. Between speed regulators, control labs, the dozens of battery box types, RCX's, multiple types of sensors, some requiring power and some not (blue vs yellow connectors) - there's a learning curve. The main differences between 9v and Powered Up is that 1) The complexity has moved from the hardware to the software which less people may be familiar with - It seems easier to stick some wires together than to understand code, and 2) People had 20 years of 9v to get used to it and for the system to expand. Powered Up has had 2 years. It's early days. Ps. The antithesis of the perception of Legos increasing complexity is the new Mindstorms set, revealed today. The dumbing down over EV3 is quite drastic.

I'm not referring to some kind of abstract product ID or name. They can call them whatever they like in that regard. :) However technically each device reports a device ID to the hub over the LPF2 wire protocol. This is a two byte number used by the various apps to determine what type of motor or sensor is attached to the port and what to do with it. It's just curious that it reports a different ID for the same internal hardware functionality, as normally if you wanted the app to enable the same functionality for both motors, you'd just use the same ID. This would also enable them to allow the motor to be used with no software update required. By making them different, the app needs to be updated to know that device ID 75 and 76 are Mindstorms motors and should be treated the same way as the SPIKE Prime ones. But it also means they can differentiate between the two, perhaps by making it appear correctly in grey or blue in the app.

Not bad English at all, I just couldn't grok what you meant. :) I'm not sure why they'd want to do that? It seems their eventual aim is to have every motor/sensor supported on every hub on the Powered Up app. I do wonder if its so they can show the correct coloured motor in a UI if necessary. I think this is the first device that has a different coloured equivalent? No other motor or sensor has different variations at the moment.

What do you mean?

@Philo @Lok24 Or...just plug it in. :) It works as normal while the USB is plugged into a power block. No need to rely on battery power at all.

So, switching topics slightly - the new Mindstorms set was announced this morning. It's basically SPIKE Prime, but with a different number of motors and sensors. SPIKE Prime - 2x medium angular motors (teal), 1x large angular motor (teal), 1x distance sensor, 1x force sensor, 1x light sensor. Mindstorms - 4x medium angular motors (light bley), 1x distance sensor, 1x sensor. The interesting thing is that it's been pointed out to me that the SPIKE Prime app received an update last week, which adds support for the new Mindstorms motors. They also seem to have different LPF2 device ids! I'm struggling to think why these motors need new device ids if the motor is functionally the same. Perhaps just so the UI can show the appropriate coloured motors in the SPIKE Prime/Mindstorms apps? Or is there a slight functional difference between the SPIKE Prime and Mindstorms motors? e[e.FlipperMediumMotor = 48] = "FlipperMediumMotor", e[e.FlipperLargeMotor = 49] = "FlipperLargeMotor", e[e.StoneGreyMediumMotor = 75] = "StoneGreyMediumMotor", e[e.StoneGreyLargeMotor = 76] = "StoneGreyLargeMotor"

Yeah, I don't think we're getting totally new trains this year. All the 2nd half sets have been leaked, including City, and no new trains in there. Possibly they meant 1st quarter 2021? Not sure about a change in wheelsets - its possible...

I don't think that's a bad approach, however I think two things you'll run into are a) The differences in capabilities between apps, and b) Lego updating the apps with new functionality. Currently the SPIKE Prime app supports the SPIKE Prime motors, but the Powered Up app doesn't. Similarly, when the Control+ motors came out, the Control+ app supported them, but the Powered Up didn't. However the Control+ motors worked anyway in "simple" powered mode, but an update that came later added support for other modes (rotation, but not absolute). The SPIKE Prime motors still don't work in the Powered Up app though. To add further insult to injury, the Control+ motors now work in the Powered Up app for most hub types, but not the Boost Move Hub. It's recognised, but can't be controlled - this is likely a firmware bug in the Boost Move Hub that has yet to be fixed. Incidentally, one further example is that Boost Color Sensor had a secret Infra-Red transmitter mode that could be used to control Power Functions models. We knew about it for months beforehand and enabled it through third party apps and libraries, but Lego only added support for it in the latest Powered Up update that came out about 6 weeks ago. My point being, I don't think basing it on capabilities exposed through "the LEGO platform" is a bad approach, but you'll find there isn't one platform to rule them all. And you may be updating your documentation as to the capabilities every time Lego updates one of their apps. I wouldn't be surprised to see Control+ absolute position start working inside the official Powered Up app once Lego adds SPIKE Prime motor support, as they are internally the same thing. @henrysunset One more thing - here is an example of absolute zero working on the Technic linear motors (Control+) on an official Lego platform - the SPIKE Prime app. Admittedly it only works in the (official) Python coding mode and not in the GUI (yet), but it does work.