Software

EV3 Brick software – the client

The EV3 brick requires a micro SD card loaded with two bits of software:

  1. ev3dev – a special version of Linux which runs on the EV3 brick. See https://www.ev3dev.org
  2. the Brickopore client software – available from https://github.com/richardmleggett/brickopore

There are two ways to get the software:

  • Harder: Install ev3dev on a micro SD card, then install the brickopore software. You’ll need to compile the brickopore software under ev3dev.
  • Pretty easy: We provide a 16Gb .dmg image which you can use to burn a 16Gb SD card.

Imaging an SD card

First, buy a 16Gb micro SD card. We use San Disk Ultra microSDHC 16Gb. Price approx. £5 at amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately some cards don’t seem to work, so if one doesn’t work, try a different brand. Or possibly try a larger size card.

Next, download and unzip the image from https://opendata.earlham.ac.uk/opendata/brickopore/brickopore_v0.1.dmg.zip

Probably the easiest way to image the card is using Etcher – download from their site.

Older Mac way to image the card

The following is some older advice we posted on how to image the card on a Mac. If Etcher doesn’t work, you could try this.

Before inserting the card, get a list of your discs by typing:

diskutil list

Then insert the card and type diskutil list again to check the path to your card, e.g.

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk2
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 15.9 GB    disk2s1

Now, unmount the disk and reformat it:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
sudo newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/disk2

(making sure to use the correct path established with the first diskutil list). When the format has finished, you can image the card with the following command:

sudo dd if=/path/to/brickopore.dmg of=/dev/disk2

It might take around 2 hours to image the card and you don’t get any feedback while it’s happening. Once it has finished, you can eject the card with:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Laptop software – the server

Download the server software (which runs on the connected computer) from https://github.com/richardmleggett/BrickoporeGUI.

You will need a Java Run Time Environment installed on your computer. If you don’t have one, visit www.java.com.

You just need the brickopore-1.0.jar file which is in the target folder. The application can be run by typing:

java -jar brickopore-1.0.jar

Running the software

We have prepared an instruction sheet for starting up the hardware and software. Click here for a PDF.