First off I would like to say hi to everyone and let you all know that Im new to the forums, and to robotics.
I have some questions about selecting a microcontroller.
After taken a look at all of them.
The Arduino appears to be the one I want to go with as far as cost goes.
A question I have about it though is I know your limited to program space on board but could you boot/load your programs from a SD card via usb? and if not usb how would you go about hooking the thing up if you can?
I seen the SD card adapter so thats where the question came from.
Also how many motor/servos can be connected and running at the same time?
would it depend on the motorcontroller that you pick?
well I think thats all the questions I have for the time being.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to your answers or help that you can give.
Hello Lawless and Welcome to the RobotShop community Forum.
Arduino is indeed a very powerful and easy to use microcontroller and is particularly well suites for beginners. Although the programming space is indeed limited, there is no need to use external memory in order to load larger programs. Form our experience, even an Entire TCP/IP stack fits in the little controller. Although you might be able to run code form an external flash memory, this is certainly not a trivial or recommend method.
External memory is mainly used to store data such as sensor readings, etc.
If you really need more programming space, then the Arduino Mega might be a good option for you.
Motors and servos are controlled via Motor controllers and the number you can control can greatly vary depending on the controller you choose. By choosing the controller properly, you could control several hundreds of motors without problems.
