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
