Dare I say a late Christmas in July? Today the mailman brought me two new toys that I have been looking forward to getting my hands on.The gentlemen over at Mindsensors.com and OpenElectrons.com sent me a rather nice gift. First up is the Teemino. As you may know, I recently got a DRIOD cell phone. I have been wanting to play with the ADK for a while now, but never had any hardware. The Teemino is an ADK board made by OpenElectrons.com. I have a few projects in mind for this board, but I want to start simple (just blinking a light). Check back for more updates with this board.
The next item probably deserves a whole post in itself. The NXShield is an Arduino shield that replicates (most) of the NXT. The shield has not 3, but 4 motor ports and 4 sensor ports. It fits the Arduino Uno or similar form factor. (It actually wont fit the Arduino Mega or Teemino due to a power jack on the board.) The motors and sensors are controlled via I2C. Furthermore, since it is Arduino, you could stack in an xBee shield (or other custom shield) and make a modular robot. Maybe make a NXT to NXShield communication using a Dexter Industries NXTBee? Or we could even mix in that GPS Bee I posted about. With the Arduino platform, the possibilities are endless!
Now just adding a motor port is awesome, but the NXShield has 6 servo motor headers. This means it can really drive just about anything. It would seem the Arduino is now the limiting factor in the system, but what did I say about fitting Arduino form devices??? Well the NXShield does in fact work with Maple (and a few other Arduino boards). Currently the libraries are only for the Arduino, but I plan to do some porting to make it all work together. I will be sure to post my library on the files page as well as some code examples.
Speaking of porting, there is another platform this could work with. By now you have to be wondering when I am going to mention National Instruments or LEGO. Well fear not! National Instruments released a LabVIEW for Arduino toolkit. It has support for I2C (as well as GPIO and SPI). See where I am going yet? You could actually use the NXShield with an Arduino running LabVIEW. Expect some VIs and code examples to get you started there as well.
So WOW! What a day and what an opportunity! I cant wait to get started!
Milluzzi Labs 
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been tinkering with the Uno and was looking to move on to the arduino mega adk. Can you tell me what is the difference between the one offered at the arduino store and the teemino device offered by open electronics.
thanks
David
Hello,
While I have never used the ADK version of the Mega, the only real differences I notice are the layout of the board and that fact that the Teemino uses a micro USB as where the Mega ADK uses a full size one. Both use the same Mega 2560 microcontroller so IO is the same. I have been very pleased with Mindsensors/openelectrons in the past, so I chose their product.I have had no issues with the Teemino and I am actually working on an Android App that leverages it right now!
Andy
Sounds like a fun project. I take it that your android app will be downloaded from your pc tothe teemino via the usb port? Does the micro USB also provide for comm from apps running on an android phone… or does that require anothor shield?
Thanks
David
Hello!
My android app will be downloaded from my PC to my phone. I have written some software in C that will run on the Teemino that my android app knows how to talk to (thanks to the adk). To download my software to the Teemino, I use the micro USB port, but then I connect a cable from the Teemino to the phone via the USB cable that came with it. That cable plugs into the full USB port. I have not used any shields on the Teemino yet as I am still trying playing around with the communication between the two devices.
Andy