This post was originally send out to my newsletter subscribers. The newsletter documents all my updates and imrpovements to the Lego Sorting bot. It is an almost monthly newsletter (in practice, I send out about 6 newsletters per year). You can read previous editions here, or you can subscribe using the form below.

Hello builders and makers,

Welcome to this (sort-of) monthly newsletter! You’re receiving this because you signed up for updates on the automated Lego sorting machine. If you’re no longer interested, feel free to unsubscribe using the link at the bottom—no tricks, no hard feelings.

Newsletter Archive

Up until now, all previous editions of this newsletter lived only in your inbox. If you missed one, it was simply gone. No longer!

I’ve set up a newsletter archive on my personal blog. Every edition is now published there. You can browse them at your leisure, re-read old updates, and share specific issues with friends or fellow builders who might be interested in the project.

More then every, the newsletter doubles as a public journal of the whole build process, from the very first experiments to wherever this ends up going.

An Identity Crisis

Over the last year, my main technical goal was clear: rebuild the machine and replace EV3 with newer Powered Up components.

But this part of the project has been stuck for a while, mostly because I’ve been trying to follow LEGO’s shifting smart-brick direction.

I first aimed for the Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit, but it was discontinued after only a short run. So I switched to Powered Up, which is workable but still awkward to control from an external computer. I hoped the Raspberry Pi Build HAT would be the bridge, but in practice it didn’t become the solid long-term solution I needed.

Then, last December, not much after my previous newsletter, LEGO announced a new smart brick that many builders assume will eventually replace Powered Up.

So I’ve been in a bit of a dip these last few months, unsure whether I should keep forcing a pure-LEGO path, or move toward non-LEGO components with a more predictable shelf life (and usually a lower cost).

For now, I’m still figuring that out. So I’m sorry that there isn’t some huge progress to report.

As always, your feedback is absolutely welcome. Thanks for following along on this journey. Happy sorting, and I look forward to sharing more updates soon!

Peter