“LEGOs,” or more properly, “LEGO bricks” have inspired kids to build cars, castles, and many other fantastic creations since the later half of the 20th century. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a modern engineer or maker that didn’t play with these as a kid, since they work so well as a toy that’s relatively safe, yet one that lets you create something new and unusual.
Though there are still castles and cars to be made, LEGO has fully moved into the 21st century. In fact, using their EV3 processing unit, you can make your pretend LEGO robots actual robots! For example here’s an EV3 powered device playing a keyboard:
As neat as that is, LEGO did something even more amazing with this tech, and released it under an open source license. With this available, hackers Tully and Andy with Maker Studio took this EV3 architecture, and adapted it to an even more powerful platform, the BeagleBone Black. They named this new creation the “EVB.”
Interface-wise, you can plug all the normal LEGO sensors into the EVB, and since it’s based on the BeagleBone, the system is extremely versatile. Though the EV3 is no slouch, running at an impressive 300 MHz, the EVB is even more powerful, with a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. You can see it displaying its prowess to solve a Rubik’s cube 3:00 in the video below:
