NXTPowerMeter

Mindsensors.com sent me their newest sensor last week. This is the NXTPowerMeter. Imagine a digital multimeter integrated into a NXT. This has amazing data logging possibilities. Using the NXTHID, we can interface the results with the computer.

In this video, I decided to see how the voltage varies in the RCX with a motor under no load. The RCX motor was turned on at full power (which means there should be no PWM). Every second the NXTPowerMeter took a sampling and communicated it back to the computer. This communication was done via the NXTHID interfacing with Microsoft Excel 2007. Excel was set up to graph the input as it was recorded to the spread sheet. A similar program could interface with Matlab and do some more complex analysis. The RCX was controlled via the NRLinx-NX from mindsensors.com. This ensured that the RCX was always on and turned the RCX off when the program was complete.

All programming was done via National Instrument's LabVIEW 8.6 and the NXT toolkit 2.0. The NXT was running firmware 1.28.

For more information, check out mindsensors.com!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• NXTPowerMeter
• NXTHID
• NXT
• RCX
• Lego
• Robotics