The LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit inspires millions of builders worldwide and makes them smile from ear to ear every time when the pieces come to life. The kit includes sensors, motors, hundreds of LEGO bricks and the EV3 programmable brick.

After I see hundreds of LEGO projects, I’m wondering if anything would be better than the EV3 programmable brick to control the motors, sensors and other components. Yes, there is something better than the EV3, and it’s called EVB.

Imagine a LEGO robot controlled with a programmable ‘brick’ having eight times more memory and three times more processing power.

The EVB is a shield engineered to replace the EV3 with a BeagleBone Black single board computer. 100% compatible with LEGO components, the EVB lets you use the original components and opens new possibilities for additional hardware and software.

The BeagleBone Black is a low-cost Linux computer featured with plenty of I/O pins and with support for plug-in boards called “capes”. The development board has a 1GHz AM3359 Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 512 MB RAM. Due to the EVB shield, all these features can replace the 300 MHz processor and the 64MB RAM of EV3.

With four steps, you can replace the EV3 with a BeagleBone Black. Take the Black, plug the EVB shield over the top of the board, connect the LCD screen, and finally the battery. That’s all and nothing more.

For Arduino users, the EVB supports an ADC module in order to use all the Arduino analog sensors in your Mindstorms project. All the EV3 sensors (gesture, pressure, light, IR, temperature) is compatible with the EVB shield.

One of the greatest robotics kits has now endless capabilities. In just a few words, this means that the EV3 is now better than ever.

This video shows how easy is to replace the EV3 with a BeagleBone Black