<\/a>For the evenings at late summer holidays on a small island in the German north sea I bought a Lego 4×4 Offroader<\/a> to build with the kids. The truck has 4×4 driving and steering, and is controlled by an ir remote. Coming home with the built truck\u00a0 I was curious whether I could use an arduino to control the car.<\/p>\n

So let’s share what I found out:\u00a0The truck uses the Lego power functions (info<\/a>). One could use wiring to control it, but since I got some experience with ir control, I tried it this way, so no physical connection is needed. I found three libraries out there to control Lego power functions with the arduino and ended with this one: LEGOPowerFunctions<\/a>. To get it to run I had to insert the line „#include <Arduino.h> in the legopowerfunctions.h file. After that everything worked fine. Spending a lot of time with soldering in the last projects I also wanted to try a system without soldering, so I gave the grove<\/a> system from seeed a try. For a small prove of concept I used an IR Emitter<\/a>, a LCD Display<\/a> (for debugging),\u00a0 a LED-Bar<\/a> and an ultrasonic range sensor. And here is the (simple) code which you can use as start. It simply drives the truck forward and backs up and turn if it is approaching\u00a0 a wall. It also gives some simple debugging info on LCD and the LED-Bar.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n