Book Image

Lego Mindstorms EV3 Essentials

By : Abid H. Mujtaba
Book Image

Lego Mindstorms EV3 Essentials

By: Abid H. Mujtaba

Overview of this book

<p>Building robots from scratch can be a tough task, but the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit makes it easy to create them in minutes. Far more than a toy, the programming brick allows you to create functional robots while its open source and hackable nature will allow you to use the powerful LeJOS framework to create projects of increasing complexity.</p> <p>This book provides a rapid and practical guide to building with EV3. Get up and running and swiftly learn how to construct and program automated robots using the EV3's brick, motors, and sensors. Next, you'll construct an obstacle-avoiding robot and learn how to program the EV3 brick before moving on to the advanced possibilities of the LeJOS framework. You will also learn how to install LeJOS, link your computer to EV3, and how to use it to program your Lego robots in Java. You will then quickly get to grips with using LeJOS by constructing an autonomous line-tracking robot. By the end of this book, you will be able to unleash the full creative power of Lego Mindstorms EV3.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Lego Mindstorms EV3 Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
The Make Utility
Index

Limitations of visual programming


In this chapter, we have learned how to program EV3 using the Brick Program application, a visual programming language that uses icons/blocks to construct a sequence of commands that the brick executes to control the robot to our specification.

This is an extremely simple and straightforward means of controlling the robot and, as such, is a powerful programming paradigm. We saw firsthand how easy it is to start writing programs for EV3 using the Brick Program application. It is particularly advantageous when it comes to lowering the entry threshold for programming robots, and is a crucial part of why EV3 works so well as an educational and recreational resource for children.

However, its simplicity, which is such a strength of the Brick Program application, is also the source of many of its limitations:

  • Block values (motor speeds and sensor measurements) are limited to a predetermined set.

  • There is only a single global loop. There are no smaller loops within...