BrickNil - Control LEGO Bluetooth Sensors and Motors with Python

BrickNil [*] provides an easy way to connect to and program LEGO® Bluetooth hubs (including the PoweredUp Passenger Train 60197 and Cargo Train 60198 sets, and the Lego Duplo Steam Train 10874 and Cargo Train 10875 ) using Python on OS X and Linux. This work was inspired by this EuroBricks thread and the NodeJS Powered-Up library. Unlike the official apps available from LEGO, BrickNil allows you to control multiple hubs with a single program, which lets you easily scale to programming large interactive systems.

BrickNil requires modern Python (designed and tested for 3.7) and uses asynchronous event programming built on top of the Curio async library. As an aside, the choice of async library is fairly arbitrary; and enabling another library such as asyncio or Trio should be straightforward.

An example BrickNil program for controlling the Train motor speed is shown below:

from curio import sleep
from bricknil import attach, start
from bricknil.hub import PoweredUpHub
from bricknil.sensor import TrainMotor

@attach(TrainMotor, name='motor')
class Train(PoweredUpHub):

    async def run(self):
        for i in range(2):  # Repeat this control two times
            await self.motor.ramp_speed(80,5000) # Ramp speed to 80 over 5 seconds
            await sleep(6)
            await self.motor.ramp_speed(0,1000)  # Brake to 0 over 1 second
            await sleep(2)

async def system():
    train = Train('My train')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    start(system)

• Free and open-source software: ASL2 license
• Documentation: http://virantha.github.io/bricknil
• Source: https://github.com/virantha/bricknil