With Powered Up brought Lego a more accessible and cheaper alternative to the robotic system EV3-Mindstorms on the market. A set followed with Lego Boost (from €214.99), which offered three servomotors, a color and distance sensor and many parts per monetary unit. This series culminated in the Robot Inventor (Inventor) set (from €359.99), which was named Mindstorms got (like the NXT series) and was supposed to replace the EV3 series. But by the end of 2022 it was over again. In this article I will show that the system is very interesting due to the hardware, especially when you are dealing with the open source firmware Pybricks can suddenly program autonomous robots. The availability of Powered-Upcomponents, however, has become very bad: Here, too, I give tips on what you can still buy and what you can find better on the used market.
Many makers know or own Lego. Aside from the obvious fun of building, robotics sets offer a lot of educational content. Hardly any other robotic concepts can be tried out so quickly: from line followers, walking robots or balancing robots to entire factory models, a lot is possible and all parts can be reused later.
At Boost and Powered Up until now there was only one graphical programming app available for tablets, for EV3 and SPIKE there was also MicroPython, but that was mainly for educational purposes. The big disadvantage of the app solution is that the robots only work if the tablet and the app are running.
