About 9 months ago, FATCATLAB posted a Kickstarter for an EV3 cape for the BeagleBone Black, an open source embedded Linux computer created by Texas Instruments. Their product was called the EVB. It was successfully funded and kits shipped out a few months ago. I received mine a little while back. Generally I prefer using an EV3 brick, but I have loaned a bunch of my EV3s out to a local school district for training for FIRST LEGO League as they were awaiting their shipment of EV3s from LEGO Education.
See my thoughts (that didn’t make the video) after the break.
I am not one to sit still and I had an idea for a bot, but needed a brain. I didn’t want to remove one from a Creep3r, so I decided to play with my EVB. After about 2 minutes I had the micro SD card imaged and found some batteries to test with. I grabbed a handful of sensors and motors and decided to test it out.
Above is the video of my first thoughts actually using my EVB. I really like it. It lacks Bluetooth and WiFi support (as I discover the hard way on the video, live). They claim WiFi is coming soon. In the video you see my test a quick video. I am still not quite sure why it wouldn’t complete playing the audio before exiting.
While my EV3-G skillz are not 100% (I have fallen in love with EV3DEV, which allows me to use Python or C++.) I wrote a quick test program in the video that seems to work well. I haven’t played with EVB much yet, but I am interested to see if I can get EV3DEV to boot on the EVB. The stock firmware and EVB worked well for the testing of the bot I am playing with right now. (Sorry, no details on it right now. It’s a secret!) I cant wait to see where the creators take the project. I am really into embedded Linux (as if you cant tell) and this is a really cool use of the hardware.
Stay tuned for more tinkering with the EVB. I don’t have my EV3s back yet, so who knows what other trouble I will get into!
Milluzzi Labs 