RF Communication for LEGO/Handy Board with Tmote

LEGO robots with Handy Board controllers have been widely used in upper-division Computer Science courses, such as Robotics and Embedded Systems. However, due to the limited communication capability available on the Handy Board controller, only a single individual LEGO robot was exploited for each student group to complete a certain mission in most existing courses. In this paper, we describe our experience on enhancing the Handy Board controller with Tmote for radio-frequency (RF) communication capability. We discuss the hardware connections and sample codes for communication between Handy Board and Tmote via serial communication ports. With such enhancement, we can build LEGO robots that have wireless communication capability. Future courses that could benefit from such enhanced LEGO robots are also discussed.