LEGO Mindstorms 51515 with NVIDIA Jetson Nano
This project combines the LEGO Mindstorms 51515 with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB. Via a serial connection, using Bluetooth or a micro USB cable, the Jetson Nano will be able to control the Mindstorms Hub.
LEGO Mindstorms 51515
On October 15, 2020, LEGO launched the Mindstorms 51515 Robot Inventor kit. It is the fourth generation of the LEGO Mindstorms coding system and has the following features:
- 5x5 LED matrix
- Bluetooth connectivity
- Gyro/accelerometer 6 axes
- Speaker
- Light/Color sensor
- Distance sensor
- 4 low-profile, medium-angle motors with an integrated absolute-positioning rotation sensor
NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB
At the end of October 2020, NVIDIA introduced the Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit. It includes a Jetson Nano module with 2 GB memory and delivers 472 GFLOPS of compute performance with a 128-core NVIDIA Maxwell GPU and 64-bit Quad-core Arm A57 CPU. Using the USB ports of the Jetson Nano, we can also add extra devices, such as a camera, microphone and speaker. The MIPI CSI-2 connector can also be used to add a camera.
WARNING: The heatsink gets hot!
Python programming
Normally, the LEGO Mindstorms can be programmed with Scratch or MicroPython. With MicroPython, it is possible to execute Python scripts remotely. In this project, we use the latter technique in order to control the LEGO Mindstorms from the Jetson Nano.
Combining with the Jetson Nano
By combining the LEGO Mindstorms with the Jetson Nano, we can potentially leverage the GPU power of the Jetson Nano for more complex tasks, for example face recognition. In a previous project, this has been implemented together with the LEGO Boost.
Due to the small size, Charlie the robot can easily carry the Jetson Nano on it's back. By adding a few LEGO bricks from the LEGO Mindstorms box, the Jetson Nano can be attached and even be complemented with a Power bank for standalone operation.
Since the following demo is not requiring a GPU, you could also use another type of Single Board Computer.
Kernel recompilation
For communicating with the LEGO Hub, serial communication will be used. Unfortunately, the Jetson Nano has an issue with this: RFCOMM TTY support not available. As described on the linked page, this requires the Linux kernel to be recompiled on the Jetson Nano.
Text recognition (OCR) demo with Charlie
In this demo, Charlie will read Chinese sentences from a piece of paper. When the piece of paper is within a distance of 20 centimeters, Charlie will try to read the sentence. If the text is recognized, Charlie will repeat it in Chinese. After that, Charlie will translate the text to English and display it on the LED matrix. Finally, Charlie will speak out the English translation.
Demo's
- Chinese speech recoginition (OCR) demo
- Face recognition demo
Extra required hardware
A few accessory hardware items are required for running the demo's.
HDMI monitor
You need an HDMI monitor for starting up the demo from the desktop.
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse
A Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are recommended for ease-of-use. This way, only plugging in the HDMI cable is needed for programming the robot. Besides, the Jetson Nano 2GB only has three USB ports, which will be needed by the following peripheral devices.
Wi-fi dongle
If not already provided, you need to get a Wi-fi dongle for remote ssh access or access to the Google Speech API's.
Bluetooth dongle
For connectivity with the LEGO Hub, you need a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) dongle. This dongle is also used for the Bluetooth speaker, keyboard and mouse. For this demo, a CSR 4.0 dongle was used. A Bluegiga dongle was not working on the Jetson Nano.
Camera
For this demo, the IMX219-77 Camera with 77° FOV was used.
Power bank
For standalone operation, the Jetson Nano needs a power bank or battery pack. The Lego Hub itself is using a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. A power bank should have output 5V and 2,4A. 1,0A will still work.
Bluetooth speaker
For this demo, a mini Bluetooth speaker was used.
Software installation
Now it's time to do some sudo and pip commands (and some kernel recompilation...):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
Serial communication
As mentioned above, the default kernel on the Jetson Nano needs to be recompiled in order to enable serial communication. This is quite a heavy process and will take about one hour. This page gives a good description of the kernel recompilation process. Before starting, be sure to have 9 GB space available. When configuring the new kernel, enable the following features:
- serial (tty) communication
- Bluetooth LE
Furthermore, the following commands are required for serial communication.
sudo apt-get install rfcomm
sudo pip3 install pyserial
OpenCV
The Jetson Nano 2GB is provided with a pre-installed software package (JetPack 4.4). One of the many AI libraries is OpenCV. In this demo, OpenCV is only used for capturing and enhancing video frames.
Text recognition (OCR)
For text recognition, Tesseract OCR 4.0.0 is used
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
sudo pip3 install pytesseract
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim
Fix a small issue with the trained data:
/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata$ sudo mv chi_sim.traineddata chi-sim.traineddata
Google Translate
sudo pip3 install googletrans
Text-to-speech
For this demo, the Google Cloud Speech API has been used:
The Python library gTTS is used. In order to play the sound on the Bluetooth speaker, follow the Connecting Bluetooth Audio tutorial.
sudo pip3 install gTTs
sudo apt-get install mpg123
sudo apt-get install flac
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
Finally:
sudo reboot
Usage
- Connect the HDMI cable with the Jetson Nano
- In the desktop, start the Bluetooth manager
- Connect with the LEGO Hub
- Get permission for the serial connection:
sudo chmod 777 /dev/rfcomm0(or do:sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER) - Open a terminal
- Run the program with
sudo python3 ocr_demo.py - For standalone operation, disconnect the HDMI cable
- Enjoy the show!
Stop the program by:
- Connecting the HDMI cable again
- Enter Ctrl+C in the terminal