Lego Robotics with David Lechner and Denis Demidov

Summary Do you like Legos, robots, and Python? This week I am joined by David Lechner and Denis Demidov to talk about the ev3dev project and how you can program your Lego Mindstorms with Python! Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable. When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at www.podastinit.com/linode?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. Need to learn more about how to scale your apps or learn new techniques for building them? Pluralsight has the training and mentoring you need to level up your skills. Go to www.pythonpodcast.com/pluralsight?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss to start your free trial today. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. If you work with data for your job or want to learn more about how open source is powering the latest innovations in data science then make your way to the Open Data Science Conference, happening in London in October and San Francisco in November. Follow the links in the show notes to register and help support the show in the process. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing David Lechner and Denis Demidov about using Python with the ev3dev platform for programming LEGO robots Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you explain what the ev3dev project is and some of the story about how and why it got started? What is LEGO’s opinion of the ev3dev project? For anyone who isn’t familiar with the MINDSTORMS EV3 product from LEGO, can you give a brief overview of the hardware that they come with? Other than allowing users to program in environments other than the block-based editor that LEGO provides, what capabilities does the ev3dev project add to the MINDSTORMS EV3 platform? How are the language bindings generated and how do the different implementations compare to each other? What are the most challenging aspects of building and maintaining the ev3dev distribution and various language bindings? One of the things that my son is curious about is the possibility for integrating his MINDSTORMS with projects such as Kalliope or Mycroft to allow for voice controlled robots. Are you aware of anyone having done so or how you would approach something like that? What are some of the most interesting or innovative projects that you have seen people make with the MINDSTORMS platform running ev3dev? Why would someone want to use MINDSTORMS instead of any of the other robotics platforms that are available? For someone who is interested in learning more about intermediate and advanced robotics, what are some resources that you would recommend? Keep In Touch Denis @denis_demidov on Twitter ddemidov on Github David dlech on Github Website Picks Tobias Raspberry Pi Kalliope Denis pybind11 David Local food LocalHarvest Links ev3dev Lego MINDSTORMS BeagleBone Lego Mindstorms Community C++ Jupyter Notebooks Ralph Hempel Forth RCX NXT EV3 ARMv5 Debian PiStorms BrickPi EVB UART EV3 Schematics Look for “EV3 Hardware Developer Kit” in “Advanced Users” section. I2C RPyC Laurens Valk Liquid Templates Delta Robot Quest For Space Lego Technic Mindsensors.com Cool robots built with ev3dev Micropython The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA