Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
Dexter Industries hasn’t been sitting still in the past few weeks; they’ve been busy developing a very cool new sensor. It’s an NXT sensor that leverages the XBee as a means of communication. No longer will you be limited to slow, one-way Bluetooth connections between just your master and 3 slaves. With XBee you have can have up to 16 channels simultaneously and an indoor range of 30 meters, which goes up to an amazing 90 meters outside with Line of Sight. You can do point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, & peer-to-peer at about 115Kbps.
Don’t worry about certification, it’s been approved by the FCC, IC, ETSI (EU) and Ctick (Australia).
They made a short video to demonstrate its use; a remote US flag waving device. I will be sure to make one that waves the Dutch flag.
I can’t wait to get my hands on these. A pair of them was shipped to me yesterday, hopefully they will arrive shortly so I can start testing and playing.
http://www.bartneck.de/2009/02/16/results-lego-beyond-toys-2/
These guys used an XBee module to make a wireless sensor bridge. Think that Dexter Industries will start selling something like that?
That’s pretty exciting! My current project has 5 NXTs right now and I am using LEDs and light sensors. This would be a great addition. I hope they keep in mind that some of us have to buy several of these when the settle on the price.
Any clue if these boards will support the higher power XBees like the Pros? They need ~300 mA, quite a bit more than the ~50 mA needed by the series one XBees. It looks as if they are powered directly from the sensor port but it’d be nice if there’d be a screw terminal to wire in a three or four AA battery pack and a 3.3 V regulator on board. Or even better, a LiPO, but it would need a better regulator that’d accept voltages right down to 3.3 V and still output 3.3 V.
Thanks for posting this preview!
NXTreme, we’re definitely working on the XBees Pros! We will offer an optional kit to upgrade for an X-Bee Pro with the standard package.
Ok, thanks, thats good to know. I haven’t played with XBees before but this would be a great excuse to get some (SF Free Day maybe?).