Smart Brick support

[Nelvarion]

LEGO revealed the Smart Play system today which includes a smart brick, tags (tiles) and minifigs.
The brick has lights, sounds, color recognition and what seems to be NFC interaction with the tiles and figs - lots of interesting possibilties there!
Any chance you were able to get some early access to it and know/plan to integrate it with the Pybricks ecosystem?

[dlech]

This is news to us.

If it is just NFC and no Bluetooth Low Energy, then there isn't really a way to integrate it with Pybricks without going through a computer or other microcontroller.

So we'll leave this up to the community to have fun figuring out how it works and what we could do with it. 😄

[nathankellenicki]

@dlech There is Bluetooth Low Energy - it's announced that it's used for a) Talking to other Smart Bricks in a mesh like fashion, and b) Connecting to an app for firmware upgrades and configuration (ie. Volume). As a result it's possible there may be ways to control it over BLE - playing sounds, light effects, etc, but we'll see.

I suspect it may be the same underlying tech as Lego Education Science, using NFC to "pair" bricks together (but also define their functionality), so I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some to test.

[nduquenoy]

Hey everyone! 👋

I was wondering if there have been any new discoveries about the LEGO Smart Play brick since this discussion started a few months ago.

Has anyone managed to get their hands on one and investigate the BLE protocol, firmware update process, or communication between Smart Bricks? I’m especially curious whether there is now any way to interact with it externally (sending commands for sounds, lights, NFC events, etc.) or if the community is still mostly reverse-engineering the system.

It looks like Smart Play could have a lot of potential, especially if we could eventually experiment with it outside the official LEGO ecosystem. Would love to hear if there are any updates or interesting findings! 😄