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How to use an Ultrasonic Sensor in EV3 retail version Pro Preview

There is no block for programming the Ultrasonic Sensor in the retail version of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 software. In this video tutorial we will show you how you can download & import such blocks in order to use the sensor.

  • #46
  • 06 Nov 2013
  • 5:13

The retail version of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 software can be freely downloaded from the LEGO site. You can do this by following this link. There you have to choose your operating system, before proceeding with the download.

The block for the Ultrasonic Sensor, used in this tutorial, can be downloaded from here.

 

Antenna, designed by Christian Hohenfeld from The Noun Project

English

In this video I'd like to show you how to install the LEGO EV3 Retail Software and how to import some of the already implemented blocks. We've got a lot of questions from our users. Is it possible to use the ultrasonic sensor with the EV3 Retail version of the software? Yes, it is possible but you should first install some additional blocks. Let's start with the program.

First, start by searching the Internet for LEGO EV3 Retail Software and you'll immediately go to the LEGO Mindstorms site where you will see the Downloads tab. Under the Downloads tab you are given the option to download the EV3 version of the software. I'll give you this link in the video below, in the notes section.

I'll choose "Install for Windows"; OK; Download it. Probably the download will take some time. And I'll get back to it when it's done. It will take some time for the software to install. This is the EV3 Home Edition, the Retail version of the software. After the software is installed, we can run it.

It will take some time to load. It's getting even heavier for the new version. For example, it took some time for the NXT G to load but now it's taking more time so, I suppose the software is heavier, it requires more memory or something. After a minute or so, we can see the new software running - EV3 Home Edition. We can select different robots here. This is only available in the Retail version. We can do a software overview, click the Getting started, and I'll directly move to Creating a new project.

There's something different in this new project from the Teacher's and Student's edition of the EV3 Educational version. That is a very limited number of sensors. You have the bricks, the brick buttons, the color sensor, the infrared sensor, motor rotation, timer and touch sensor. If, for some reason, you decide to buy an ultrasonic sensor, there isn't a way for you to program this ultrasonic sensor. Luckily, LEGO has provided us with a downloadable block that you can download and install. It's a block tool which controls the ultrasonic sensor. We go again to Downloads and below, in the EV3 blocks tab, (we select it) we can see that we can download blocks for energy meter, gyro sensor, sound sensor, temperature sensor and ultrasonic sensor. Let's download the ultrasonic sensor. We can save it here. Save. And now, in the EV3 Home Edition Retail version, we can use Tools, Block Import. And we'll browse to our block that we've just saved to our Desktop, click Open, Import, and we get this informational message: "You must restart the EV3 editor for this change to take effect." OK You restart it.

And start it again.

Now, as you can see, if we create a new project,

(it takes some time) and if we go to the sensors, we can see that there's a new block here called "Ultrasonic sensor". We can use this ultrasonic sensor in our programs. That's it. I hope you liked it. Contact us if you have any other questions about the EV3 version or the NXT, or FLL as a whole.