For robots that have multiple types of sensors, like adding touch sensors, light sensors, temperature sensors, and a mix, which is easier, Picaxe or Ardunio? Or is there a better microcontroller or setup? I know Lego's NXT has these abilties, but I wanted to know what other setups are out there that work really well or are the easiest to work with or put together.
There is no “one” right answer.
In the current context of your question you can use any microcontroller you want. Your choice only gets forced when the controller you are considering isn’t capable of doing what you want to do. In bare terms, the PICAXE chips are all either PICs or PIC based while the arduinos are all AVR chips. I ‘believe’ both chips have only bootloaders onboard and then one uploads new programs via the bootloaders. Programming language and code space are your only two constraints then. The arduino likely has a large number of libraries that you can use to access different sensors, whereas, the PICAXE will only probably have code examples of how different people accessed different sensors, so, you will have to pull bits and pieces of code and put it in your PICAXE code vs just adding an already written library for the arduino.
Might want to learn a bit with Ardunio
That’s very interesting. I was looking through picax’s various commands for how to add parts, I did not know if you could add a lot of sensors to it that were all different or not at once on the board. From what I’ve read so far, Ardunios require attaching all sorts of parts to the main board to thne attach things like servos and sensors. I was not sure which was easer to simply attach multiple sensors at once. Thanks for the reply.
I wonder if we have some sort of IRC chat or something for LMR.
Re: sensors
Microcontrollers don’t know one sensor from another. They know digital and analog. You a the hobbyist need to know what kind of data will be spit out by each sensor. Simple resistive sensors won’t require any special library. Sensors that connect with protocols like i2c and spi are the ones that will need and if they are common will have libraries on arduinos to allow for easy access. They are also the sensors that would require you to copy and paste code on PICAXE chips. As I said on the beginning, pure digital or analog sensors won’t require a library. They will only require you to know what kind of data they will output, so, you will know where and how to connect them to your micro.
What about attaching special
What about attaching special boards for Ardunio? Are there slots for attahcing it to the main boards? Or do I need to add aditional components? As for analog, yeah, that’s always pretty cool. I was hoping to find out what would be a bit easier to experament with time and resource wise for attaching multiple types at once, but I think that mostly cleared that up. Thanks for your help.