My new MINUTEBOT Base

Just got a new toy in the mail today, it's called a MinuteBot Base and is the first product from a startup company in Denmark. Here is the link to their site. Here is a short video of my first (a-hem) creation with it. I learned about this on the TechnicBlog when it was just an idea posted on the Kickstarter website. I like to support underdogs and knew I could have plenty of uses for this, so I made a plege. Towards the end it was looking like it wasn't going to get the funding it needed, but in the last few days someone pledged a nice large sum that put the project comfortably in the green. They plan on producing a few more things to help bridge the gap between the fun and playability of LEGO Mindstorms robotics with the precision and accuracy of industrial robotics.

 I've also made some good progress on my LEGO tire test. Here's a picture of the vehicle -er test rig. that I will use to compare the tires. It has places to carry extra weight, and a quickchange rear axle and motor set-up. I plan on comparing several common sizes of LEGO tires, gear train designs and motors. It is all based around a new LEGO Education item for LEGO Mindstorms. It's called the LEGO Energy Meter and can measure voltage, amps, and watts coming in and going out. When you use it with the Mindstorms NXT intelligent brick you can log the data to make comparisons, I think you see where I'm going with this.

The smaller wheel in the middle is for measuring distance. You can see some of the tires I will test in the corners of the photo.

Here is a little video made by LEGO Education demonstrating the LEGO Energy Meter.