Exposed: The Lego E-Meter

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to receive one of the main components in the upcoming Renewable Energy Add-on Set. 

I didn’t get a manual with it so it was a bit of a mystery to me.  However, thanks to John Hansen and some very helpful peeps at the Lego Electronics R&D department I got some more information on what makes this thing tick. 

It’s an I2C controlled sensor.  There are some nice blocks for it available right here: [LINK] (thanks to Jetro for pointing that out to me).  John Hansen is busy working on the NXC drivers for it, so expect it to work on that platform very shortly.  I’m going to be working on the ROBOTC support for this little gem.

So what does it do?  It can measure the amount of voltage, current and total wattage produced –and- consumed by what you hook up to it.  It has a small LCD matrix screen that displays all the current stats.  You can recharge the removable battery using your NXT’s motor ports.  I am sure you’re dying to know what’s inside this thing?  I know I was, so I took a screwdriver to it.

Main unit with detachable NiMH battery.	First level of disassembly.	The main board, top side.  The small daughter board attached by cable is the top PF connector.

Underneath the LCD.	The underside of the main board.  Note the Atmega88 next the cap and NXT connector.  This is the main processor.  It’s the (slightly) larger cousin of the Atmega48 that does all the IO in the NXT.	The JTAG connector for the Atmega88.  Theoretically, this unit could be re programmed.

The green button switches the unit on.  The orange switch has three positions, 0, left and right.  It has a Technic axle hole in it, so you could connect something to it.  The idea is that you input energy via the bottom input and once you have more than 1 Joule of energy stored in this unit, you can use the orange button to control the output connector on the top.  You could run a little light on it, a motor, whatever you’d like.

If you’re keen to write your own driver for it, here’s a list of all the registers:

Requests need to be sent to I2C address 0x04 and all results (apart from Joules) need to be divided by 1000.  Also, when you read the values above in one single request, they are latched, in other words, they are a proper snapshot of a single timeframe. 

So there you have it.  You can expect this sensor to be supported in NXC pretty soon, I’m sure, I won’t make any promises John has to keep, though :)  I will be making the ROBOTC driver for this sensor part of the Driver Suite very soon.