BrickPi Delivers the Mindstorms Experience to Raspberry Pi

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.