- I have been doing alot of research lately regarding micro controllers because I am interested in making a computer automated R/C Aircraft. I know that the Bot Board II with a Basic Atom on board is capable of controlling 21 servos but my first question is how well does it handle sensors? Since there are 21 sets of pins could I, for example, have 10 servos and 5 sensors, or vice versa? I am sorry, I know my questions are very obvious to the seasoned builder but I have yet to find a definite answer to them. My last question is how well does the bot board stream data to and from the RS-232 port. I want to use a PalmOS based device to control the robot from a wireless bluetooth connection - something that I am pretty sure the bot board is not directly capable of. The PalmOS device would be the brains while the Bot Board just provided an interface between the PalmOS device and the sensors/servos. Thanks for your help.
The Bot Board with a Basic Atom 28 would give you 20 I/O not counting the built in serial port to the DB9 normally used for programming. Of those 20 pins 4 can be Analog inputs, as many as you need can be digital inputs, or servo outputs. You can drive up to 6 servos with the Atom chip before it becomes easier to use a serial servo cntroller.
Cool. Thanks for the quick reply. I am still curious as to how well the bot board plays with a PalmOS device over its serial connection. Thanks.
Actually 8 can be used as Analog inputs. 4 on the AtomPro24.
I suppose a more answerable question that has a higher chance of being tested is how well can it operate with a Windows PC over the serial connection? Could you direclty minipulate, lets say, 10 servos with a computer over the connection while refreshing the information from a few digital inputs every few hundred miliseconds? Essentially you would have the computer do all of the calculations rather than the Basic Atom computer, the Basic Atom computer and Bot Board would just serve as an interface to the servos and inputs for the Windows based computer. Thanks.