Mindsensors Motor Multiplexer (NXTMMX)

Mindsensors are very busy working on their latest sensor, the Motor Multiplexer, also known as the NXTMMX. This compact MUX can control up to two motors and allows you to daisy chain up to 5 of these. 

All of the bugs have been ironed out and I’m grateful to Mindsensors for having implemented some of my requested features. 

The first thing that struck me was the size of this MUX; it’s really very small.  When looking through the documentation another feature that caught my eye was the tweakability (that’s a perfectly good English word) of this thing.  I don’t think there is a single aspect of this MUX that can’t be tweaked or fine tuned somehow.  The PID controller for this MUX can be completely reconfigured with your own values.  This is extremely useful if you have atypical motor loads.  An example of this would be the large robot arm that I build last year.  The standard PID regulator in ROBOTC was not adequate and I had to do a lot of manual fine tuning of my own PID controller to get it right.  This MUX would’ve been able to take care of all these things, keeping the actual program on your NXT nice and simple; just the way I like it.

If you’re not someone who builds big cranes, robot arms or other large contraptions, don’t worry, the NXTMMX can still be of tremendous use to you.  How about a tribot robot with a 2-DOF manipulator arm and a swivel mounted UltraSonic sensor to find objects?  Having a few more motors ports available to you can easily take your robot building experience to the next level.

You can expect this MUX to be fully supported by my driver suite when it’s released.