This year 2023-2024 our FIRST LEGO League team, Töviscsapat-X demonstrated a very steep learning curve on achieving reasonable and reliable robot runs taking the team from regional to national final and finally to the WPI Open invitational competition. Here the team could come to a 48th/49th place with 405 points.
The team has started programming the robot in SPIKE/Mindstorms blocky environment, yet decided to switch over to Pybricks firmware even though the text-based nature of the environment gave some extra challenge.
You might feel frightened to move from block-based to text-based programming. My experience is that even 8-10-year-old kids will be able to learn and use simple text-based Python in under 20 minutes.
Note: For smaller kids and novice teams Pybricks offers an icon block-based environment as well, which is also very cool.
This is a quick tutorial for FIRST LEGO League and World Robot Olympiad teams taking the next step for a reliable robot run based on 10 years of competition and judging experience.
Team member perspective
Let’s start with a summary from Zoli Nyitrai, our robot design, and documentation lead in an FLL team Tövis Robotics Club, on his experience.
Our team participated in the FIRST LEGO League, a LEGO robot building and programming competition. Based on our results in the national finals, we earned the opportunity to participate in an international competition held in the USA. We wrote the program to control our robot in Pybricks. We were able to learn the basics with little help in a short time since this firmware was specifically developed for controlling LEGO hubs.
It is easy to interpret and issue commands. With the use of DriveBase, the robot can be moved efficiently and quickly since you don’t have to coordinate the motors yourself. Being text-based, you only need to write, and it suggests commands you can choose from, making programming very fast. Another advantage is that while programming, you can quickly and easily check what to write if you don’t know it by heart.
You can easily and quickly download the program to the robot using Bluetooth, allowing you to progress rapidly with development.
– Zoli Nyitrai
Attila’s hands-on tutorial
Let’s continue with our coach’s perspective - a hands-on introduction by Attila.
Pybricks can be used on both EV3 and SPIKE/Robot Inventor hardware. On the SPIKE hub, which we use and prefer, the process begins with replacing the firmware. It’s not difficult, and understanding it in depth isn’t necessary; all team members have learned how to use it.