On the Lego site in the Technic area I see you can purchase the hub and motors. Now I know they come with the Cat D11 dozer kit but if you buy them separately how do you program them to do what you want?? Is there some custom program (or app) that allows you to do this?? Just wondering....

You can use the powered up app

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lego.common.poweredup&hl=en&gl=US

But if you are using the hub and motors for something than what the app is programmed for how do you do it? Say I am building a crane and want to use the hub and motors and there is nothing in the app to do what I want the crane to do, how do you custom program it to do what I want it to do??

8 minutes ago, JohnsLegos said:

But if you are using the hub and motors for something than what the app is programmed for how do you do it? Say I am building a crane and want to use the hub and motors and there is nothing in the app to do what I want the crane to do, how do you custom program it to do what I want it to do??

If you want to make a crane, you'll first have to think what movements a crane has and then you'll need to think how to control those movements. Would it be a remote controlled crane with human operator, or would it have some kind of automated motion sequence which it does when commanded? Either can be made with the PU app, but you'll have to know what you want first.

The app lets you combe command blocks into a functional program. If you have absolutely no programming experience it can be quite a difficult to make anything complex, but there's tons of general programming tutorials for beginners online and some for the Powered Up app too.

To add to @howitzer's post: this is a good intro tutorial to custom programming in the Powered Up app:

 

Edited July 6, 20222 yr by heyitsdisty

dude that video actually helped me more than I expected.