Head in the sky? We know how you feel. Sometimes it takes a head full of Pi to bring things back down to Earth and no one knows that better than developer EldenGoat. This Reddit user is working on a cool, Lego-based star-finding robot, affectionately dubbed the Galilego, that uses our favorite SBC—the Raspberry Pi.
This isn’t the first stellar Raspberry Pi project we’ve had the honor of covering. In fact, we’ve had quite a few space-related creations grace our feed including this cool Pi-powered sky camera and CosmicPi, a system designed to detect unseen cosmic rays. That said, the might be the first star-finding robot we’ve come across made using a Lego Mindstorms kit.
The Galilego project is loaded up with useful features, modules, and gadgets that cater to the most elite form of hobbyist sky tracking around. It’s fitted with a camera module for snagging shots, a GPS for calculating its position and much more all powered by a Raspberry Pi 4.
Like we said before, this project is built using Lego but, to be more specific, EldenGoat is using a Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor 51515 set to build the housing. The camera used in this project is HD with a resolution of 12.3 megapixels which is ideal for snagging pictures of stars located unfathomable distances away. It also includes a built-in compass and is completely portable thanks to a 10000mAH 3.7V battery.
As of writing, the physical construction appears to be finished but there is no demo of it in action. The software-side is still in development so it’s not clear exactly how everything operates together on the Pi. It wouldn’t be hard to operate the components in this project using Python but only time will tell which method EldenGoat decides to take. This project could also be created using Raspberry Pi’s own Build HAT, an interface board for Lego components that are programmable via Python.
If you want to make something like this yourself, keep an eye out for more updates and look through our previous projects for inspiring concept designs. To get a closer look at this project and read more about its progress so far, your best bet is to check out the original thread shared to Reddit. It has a few additional pictures as well as details about the hardware used in Galilego’s design.