Flash Force Wiki
Flash Force drives LEGO electronics of every age from one web page. A hub bought last year answers over Bluetooth. A brick from 1999 answers to a flash of light. This wiki says what each one is, what it hears, and which part of Flash Force reaches it.
You do not need any of it to use the app. Read it when you want to know what the electronics in the box are.
What Flash Force reaches
| Hardware | How | |
|---|---|---|
| Straight from the page | Powered Up hubs, including the Technic Move hub · BuWizz 2 and 3 · SBrick · Circuit Cubes · Mould King DIY | Bluetooth, nothing reflashed |
| Through the bridge | RCX · Scout · Micro Scout · Power Functions (IR) · Mould King 6.0 | infrared and light from an M5Stick SE |
| Your hands | the layout on the glass · a gamepad · the keyboard | |
| With the phone off | five layouts held in the Stick's own memory |
Out of reach, and why: the 76 kHz bricks (Spybotics, Bionicle Manas, early RC Train (IR)) need a carrier the hardware cannot make. NXT, EV3 and WeDo are computers with their own toolchains rather than something you drive.
The three pages
- Control Panel — the layout editor and the remote. Everything above happens here.
- Micro Scout Torch — programs a Micro Scout with a phone's flashlight, no hardware at all. Works in iPhone Safari.
- Micro Scout Pybricks — the same codes, sent from a Powered Up hub's own LED. A browser cannot blink a torch accurately enough; a hub can.
Start here
- Sets & bricks index — every brick, what it hears, which sets it came in, part numbers.
- How the links work — all nine channels on one page: light, infrared, Bluetooth, and the opcode tables.
- Frequencies & wavelengths — carrier, wavelength and brightness for every sensor.
- VLL emitters — options & status — every way to flash light at a sensor, which ones were tried on real hardware, and what to buy.
- Link directory — the external resources worth keeping.
The bricks
Driven by light or infrared: Micro Scout · Code Pilot · Scout · RCX · Power Functions (IR) · Spybotics · Bionicle Manas · RC Train (IR) · LEGO Remote Control (9738)
Driven over Bluetooth: Powered Up · BuWizz · SBrick · Circuit Cubes · Clone hubs (Mould King · CaDA · JieStar) · LEGO Mario · SMART Play (SMART Brick)
Their own computers: NXT · EV3 · WeDo · CyberMaster, which talks radio at 27 MHz and never light.
Sending the light
Phone torch (Flash Force) · Powered Up hub (Pybricks VLL) · lego-blockly · IR LED (invisible VLL) · LEGO 9V Light brick (via RCX) · LEGO USB IR tower (RIS 2.0)
Which of them to pick: VLL emitters — options & status.
Where this came from
Twenty-five years of other people's work. The software LEGO shipped and the software the community wrote instead: NQC · BrickCC · RIS · RCX Code · ROBOLAB · leJOS · legOS · brickOS · pbForth · BrickLogo · lego-blockly · LegoRcxPy · LegoBpy · WebPBrick · DiyIrTower · rcxvll.nqh (pbrick) · Droid Developer Kit CD (_ddk.exe) · BrickController2
The people who documented the hardware: RCX Internals (Kekoa Proudfoot) · philohome (Philippe Hurbain) · pbrick.info · elecbrick (Doug Eaton) · adriansieber · LEGO official docs — Tower Interface + Scout SDK · LEGO FAQ — P program & IR tower · DACTA · Robolab sensors
Also here: M5Stick SE (the bridge) · Buildable models (DDK & DSDK)