The BrickPi is a Raspberry Pi shield that can control Lego Mindstorms robots, replacing Lego’s proprietary microcontroller brick.
After successfully kickstarting the project, Dexter Industries has established a code repository to share the progress he’s made and encourage development forks.
One interesting angle Dexter took was actually making the shield Arduino based. The shield consists of two surface-mount ATMega328 chips that control two motor control ICs and take input from 5 sensors, in part using code from Wayne & Layne’s open source Lego-controlling Arduino shields.
What is intriguing about this angle is that it could be used for any microcontroller. It could just as easily be a BeagleBone or PCDuino under the shield, because the Pi is mostly just sending pings while the ATMegas do all the hard work.
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