BrickPi Kit Marries the Raspberry Pi and LEGO for Robots

What strange synergies there are between the diminutive, Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices and LEGO. Late last year, I reported on news that came from the University of Southampton about how Professor Simon Cox and his team of researchers had lashed together an actual supercomputer made of 64 credit card-sized Raspberry Pis using Lego pieces as the glue for the cluster. Now, there is a new project called BrickPi, going into its final week of fund-seeking over on Kickstarter, which is a mashup of the Raspberry Pi with LEGO Mindstorms sensors, bricks and motors for building robots.

You can find out much more about BrickPi here.  According to its Introduction page:

"The BrickPi is a slide-on board that turns your Raspberry Pi into a robot.  The BrickPi is a board for the Raspberry Pi that helps you connect LEGO® Mindstorms sensors, motors, and parts to easily turn your credit card size computer into a powerful robot....The BrickPi makes robotics with Raspberry Pi simple."

Want to get involved? The BrickPi team adds: "We could really use your help!  We have our code and design up on Github here.  We could use some help developing better Python code for controlling the BrickPi as well as developing examples."

It should be noted that BrickPi comes from educational robot firm Dexter Industries, which sells sensors for LEGO Mindstorms. The company's Kickstarter campaign has already attracted nearly $90,000.

For more interesting combinations of the Raspberry Pi and LEGO, see our post here.