Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
Dexter Industries are currently developing a great new sensor, a proper 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for the NXT. It consists of two sensors on a single board; a 3-D gyroscope and a 3-D accelerometer. Both sensors can measure their respective values on the X, Y and Z axes.
The sensor, like many of the other Dexter Industries products before it, comes with a very bright U-R-Blind LED™ to indicate when it’s powered on. This light is also useful when trying to find your way out of a dark cave.
I’m currently working on a driver for it which will be part of the Driver Suite, of course.
Oh. Em. Gee. I must have this!!! I can’t wait for it to come out. Any idea how much it will cost? I hope it’s competitively priced with the HT one.
Hello All,
We’re aiming for a price of around $60 – $70. We’re still working on a final price though.
Best,
John Cole
//variables:
bool BlindAnyoneNearby FALSE
/:This might not be possible, but if it doesn’t work, you can always remove/replace the LED with a soldering iron.:/
Its a shame the LED on the Lego PF IRLink is not one of these very bright U-R-Blind LED™ then it might actually be able to work at 1m+.
Is U-R-Blind LED™ an actual product, or just your description? Once I see a video/picture, I would like to know if they are bright enough to consider purchasing without any attached sensors.
Hehe, is this a serious question? 🙂
I’m actually curious if this is a real company/brand. I’ve already purchased a tri-color LED for my Mindstorms projects from http://www.superbrightleds.com/ before. However, I also saw PIXAR’s commercials from fake companies before as well (such as Buy-N-Large). This brand actually sounds like something a company might create.
I’m afraid I made it up 🙂 I can ask Dexter Industries where they got them from, though 🙂
That was my first guess. 🙂 Figured I’d check anyway, and thanks for asking them!
Hey Nick, Xander is playfully exagerating a bit. You can find a lot of LED’s that are this powerful, just go to a place like Mouser.com and find any LED with Luminous Intensity above 200 mcd . . .
The one’s we use are surface mount, you will probably want a through-hole version. Here’s a parametric search on Mouser:
http://www.mouser.com/Optoelectronics/LED-Indication/Standard-LED-Through-Hole/_/N-75pv5/
At the end of the day, we could make this a lot brighter: looking at Mouser, they offer an LED that goes up to 35,000 MCD . . . I’m pretty sure that will leave you with at least a temporary hole in your retina.
Personally I wish all LED’s that are not in a torch, should be now brighter than 1 Milli Candle. All Blue LEDs should self destruct at switch on.
I waste a lot of time replacing !@#$ Bright Blue LED’s with calming low brightness green & red ones. The wife has arrived this afternoon with a Wii Accessory Charging console which not only has Blue LEDs that rival Lasers, but they flash in extremely annoying patterns as a bonus.
So there goes the warranty and another handful of warm glowing LEDs. Plus my Saturday afternoon!
That aside, the Dexter Industries 6-DOF IMU will be a definite for the sensor box. No more need for two sensors as is the case now in many application.
Wow, I had no idea there would be such a backlash against the Blue LED!
Don’t worry John, I am sure there is still a lot of love out there for them!
I agree with Xander. Blue is so cool.
[…] picture of my NXT illuminated by the Dexter Industries’ upcoming 6-DOF IMU’s U-R-Blind LED™. The red light is the power strip’s main switch and the green in the […]
Back to the point, it’s getting close to 2 months since your announcement. Any idea on how soon this IMU will be available? Will the NXT-G block be able to tell your current position, orientation and speed in relation to a calibrated initial position? This would be beyond cool.