The LEGO Mindstorms motor control board for Raspberry Pi combines the force of the Raspberry Pi with the mechanical force of powerful LEGO Mindstorms motors. Four LEGO EV3 servo motors can be connected, with PWM speed control for two of them and direction control for all four.

LEGO EV3 motors have built-in optical encoders that generate pulses when a motor rotates. This feedback signal can be used to measure the speed and position of the motor’s axis, allowing control within one degree of accuracy.

The LEGO Mindstorms motor control board for Raspberry Pi has 16 digital I/Os for all kinds of –not only LEGO- sensors and actuators, connected to the RPi’s I2C bus via two MCP3008 I/O-expanders. The Raspberry Pi can add keyboard, mouse, camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, display etc. to your design, and of course more RPi modules be combined to allow more complex control in your LEGO projects.

The board is 9 VDC powered, either by a battery pack or mains powered supply. It has an efficient on-board LM2956 5 VDC converter for powering the Raspberry Pi. It has a stackable 40-pin socket for the connection to the Raspberry Pi, and this also allows additional HAT-boards to be stacked on the RPi.

Your LEGO project can be programmed in any programming language available for the Raspberry Pi like C or Python, the latter supported by the library rpirobot.lib. There are some example Python scripts available that demonstrate the use of the board’s I/Os and control of LEGO EV3 servo motors.

This software from the book Raspberry Pi – Explore the RPi in 45 Electronics Projects can be used with this board.