Wiki / Third-party bricks
Circuit Cubes
Circuit Cubes are LEGO-compatible electronic bricks from Tenka Labs, built around a rechargeable Bluetooth battery cube with three outputs on it. The cube hears Bluetooth Low Energy and nothing else: no infrared, no password, and plain text where every other brand writes a binary packet.
Reach
| Capability | State | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Three outputs, addressed by letter | works, untested here | A, B and C, each a sign and a magnitude up to 255, and every frame carries all three: the BrickController2 code says omitting a zeroed output sometimes failed to stop it |
| Stop everything at once | works, untested here | It has a stop of its own, one byte long, so a frame of three zeros is never sent as text |
| Battery reading | works, untested here | Asked with one letter, answered as plain text on the notify characteristic; a one-byte reply is the echo of the question and not the answer |
| Connecting with no password and no pairing | works, untested here | Connect, discover, write — as with all four brands that sell a Bluetooth battery brick |
| Holding an angle, or moving a fixed amount | out of reach | The outputs take power only: no encoder behind them and no position command, so nothing can offer this brick a servo or a stepper |
| Straight from the page | works, untested here | The Control Panel carries the service and the text frame, and nobody here has had a cube in hand |
| From the bridge, with no phone in the loop | works, untested here | The same vendor table is in the bridge firmware |
What it hears
Bluetooth Low Energy, and over a generic Nordic UART service rather than one of its own. Nothing in that service names the maker — the bridge advertises the same one — so whatever goes looking has to ask this cube last, and only when nothing else fits. What travels on it is text lines, not packets — the service, the characteristics and the frame are in Third-party hubs over Bluetooth, and How the links work puts this link beside the other eight.
Reaching it today
- The page. Open the Control Panel in a browser that has Web Bluetooth, add the cube as a hub, point controls at A, B and C. Nothing is flashed and nothing is paired.
- The bridge, when the model has to run from a gamepad with no phone in it. It speaks the same text frames from the same table.
- BrickController2 on a phone, for a path somebody else has already driven.
Links
- Implemented in BrickController2, which is where the frame was read from.
- Neighbours on the same radio: SBrick and BuWizz.