ROSSTORMS

Hardware and Software for combining the power of the Robot Operating System with the ease of use of LEGO Mindstorms motors and sensors.

Hardware

To avoid the clunky and expensive LEGO brick, an expandable circuit board with 4 motor ports, 4 sensor ports, as well as other interfaces for non LEGO sensors and actuators.

Possible Features

• Grove board support
• Arduino shield support
• Raspberry pi header support
• USB (versus serial only)

Firmware

Uses rosserial to communicate with master controller. Data that is reported is set up by master upon initialization.

Possible Data

• Motor 1, 2, 3
  • drive setting
  • tachometer count

Possible Commands

• Motor 1, 2, 3
  • drive setting
  • reset tach
  • enable/disable data tx

Software

The software is meant to run on a Linux machine with ROS. If the user desires to not use ROS, it is also possible to write python programs for rosstorms.