DIY educational kit using Legos and Espruino Pico

Just posted a little article about my positive experience with the Espruino for getting my 7-year old into programming.
I made him a few electrical Lego bricks that he can use in his projects and write code to control them using Blockly with some custom blocks.
http://ytai-mer.blogspot.com/2015/05/ele­ctro-legos.html
Many thanks to the developers for the good work!

Very cool project! I think I will adapt that for my kids...

@ytai very good, kids just love physical computing

That's fantastic - thanks for posting it up! Would it be ok if you contributed your Servo block back? I imagine it'd be really handy!

Very creative - liked to read the blog entry very much: exposing the kids without pushing them into a limiting mold. When and how to enable and support new worlds for a child are significant parenting decisions.

A great example for connecting software and hardware ^2 and ^3: electrical, mechanical, and construction 'hardware'.

I would love to. It isn't much more then mapping the value from degrees to duty-cycle and adding the { freq: 50 } to analogWrite(...).
One problem with pushing this upstream is that different kinds of servos have different mappings from pulse width to angle. I could expose the raw pulse width as an argument for the block, but that would make the block less friendly / useful.
Any suggestions on how to make this configurable without too much hassle for the block user? Perhaps a global servoConfig block that much precede and usage of servoWrite(...)? But then, is it too much to assume that a given program will only use one servo type?
For the purpose of my son's usage, I simply hard-coded the mapping of the specific servo that I gave him, and problem solved...

Congratulations on hitting Hackaday!

Yes, the non-calibration of servos is a pain - but I'd be tempted to not even bother trying to get an angle in degrees (what if you're using 2 different types of servos?). Maybe use a percentage instead (and just 1ms-2ms pulse widths, which everything handles). Or maybe -1 to +1, so you can feed the value of sin straight into it for nice movements.

I imagine that for most things it'd actually be more educational and fun just using trial and error to find the right numbers?

And @Gordon: Congratulations for adding Java to Espruino. I missed that. Is it running in parallel to JavaScript or alternatively? :-).

@Stevie - A pretty disappointing mistake by hackaday considering that they still haven't fixed it despite comments pointing it out. Also, they featured the Pico kickstarter!

I know... To be honest they don't really seem to like Espruino that much. I don't think the editors really 'get it'.

... of course they love Tessel now, but they also totally didn't read between the lines of Tessel's announcement - it looks like they're making Tessel an Open Source project because they no longer intend to work on it full-time - I believe they ran out of VC money. I guess we'll see what happens over the next year or so though...