Alpha Testers Needed!

[EricVanWyk]

Hey all! The TL;DR; is that I need alpha testers for the first product my recently incorporated startup is producing. If you have access to an FRC bot, an iPhone (4S or 5 only right now), and some time in the next few weeks, please let me know!

The long version:
As some of you already know, I've moved back to MA and I've been doing the adjunct professor / startup thing for a bit. For the first time in my adult life I have a job that isn't directly related to FIRST... so I developed a Bluetooth Multimeter that has a couple features suspiciously well aligned with FRC tasks. Our rev 5 prototypes are coming back from manufacture next week, and I'd really love to get a few in to the hands of some FRC students.

It looks an awful like the bottom half of a traditional multimeter, because we cut off the screen, knob, buttons, etc and replaced them with a bluetooth low energy link to your smartphone, tablet, computer, tessel, etc. Standard multimeter features:
Voltage up to 1kV, Current up to 10A, resistance, diode, temperature, etc... but it also has a few new bits:

Wireless:
I have a few scars from taking measurements on moving FRC bots as a highschooler. This was stupid and dangerous, don't do it. We were getting roughy 30 feet of range on the previous antenna, so you won't have to have freshman sprinting after robots.

Simultaneous Sampling:
We can do voltage and current at the same time (true simultaneous sampling), which lets us do power factor, noise, distortion measurements.

"Big Al" mode:
One of my favorite modes is (internally) named after local internet celebrity Al Skierkiewicz from his oft quoted "1 foot of 10AWG is 1mOhm". We can use an external current shunt (e.g. the wire between the PD and the breaker) to look at arbitrarily high currents. This is compatible with voltage measurement, so you can see the power your bot is drawing at 8000 samples per second with three aligator clips and no modification to your wiring.

Datalogging:
All measurements can be pushed to an internal SD card for later review.

Also, if you have any interesting ideas for use cases, I'm very very interested to hear

Thanks
- Eric

[Tom Line]

PM Sent.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Spectrum is signing up.

Any idea if you will be making PC or Android apps anytime soon?

i love this idea, "Big Al" mode seems like a must have feature, that's information I have always wanted but never had an easy way to get from FRC robots.

[tim-tim]

PM sent. The RoboBees are definitely interested in this.

[EricVanWyk]

Wow wow wow! My inbox is stuffed! I'll be responding shortly by PM.

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

Any idea if you will be making PC or Android apps anytime soon?

We will definitely support Android and iPhone out of the gate. For this alpha we decided to focus on one so we could be a bit more agile in accepting the feedback generated.

As for PC, we did most of our initial development talking to a python app running in linux. This used a bluetooth low energy dongle that registers as a generic serial port, so this method is super portable.

Windows 8 is the first MS OS that offers native support, we are undecided on when to integrate that.

The profile and protocol will be open sourced, and we've already success with a friend of mine hooking up to it with his own program.

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

i love this idea, "Big Al" mode seems like a must have feature, that's information I have always wanted but never had an easy way to get from FRC robots.

I'm pretty excited about this one too. Our noise floor in this mode is on the order of microvolts, which means that a foot of 10AWG should be able to resolve between milliamps and a kiloamp... assuming no external noise sources ;-)

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

"Big Al" mode:
One of my favorite modes is (internally) named after local internet celebrity Al Skierkiewicz from his oft quoted "1 foot of 10AWG is 1mOhm".

Somebody is listening. Thanks Eric.

[pfreivald]

Looks like a slick product--can't wait to get my grubby mitts on one!

[EricVanWyk]

We just turned on the lights in our parts of the internet, and I must admit that I have a lot of internet to learn.

If you are interested, take a gander at http://mooshim-e.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/MooshimEngineering and join our mailing list! Product updates and scheduley bits to follow soon!

[DampRobot]

Is the "next few weeks" including build season? If so, I think we'd like one!

[EricVanWyk]

Here is a quick preview vid of what one of our Alpha testers have been up to with Mooshimeter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3o1_sWSaUU

[Woolly]

This would be great for seeing the amperage loads on a robot while moving to see if it's ever close to tripping the breaker.

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by Woolly

This would be great for seeing the amperage loads on a robot while moving to see if it's ever close to tripping the breaker.

I couldn't have said it better myself!