Well, I've been foiled in my last endevor by two women and too much time on their hands... but at least they let me take the cans to the scrapyard and I got about $30 for the aluminium. So, I move onto my next idea.
After searching Google a long time ago, I found an article (book actually) that was talking about putting a motherboard and PSU into a robot chassis and using Linux and Python to run a robot with a small hard drive. Now we talk about Mhz for core, Megs of Ram and Gigs for storage! I have plenty of older parts that can be used with Linux rather easily and knowledge of running it now that I converted my personal desktop to Gentoo Linux for the last year. I'm a self-taught programmer by nature and my family is carpenters and electricians.
I've been playing with Python for a while and it seems pretty interesting and easy to code in, built in threading, scheduling and the like. Plus, with a built in SSH process and possible Wifi NIC, it would be accessable from any computer on the network. I've seen wiring and boards designed for automotive use that could be used to convert DC battery power to DC MotherBoard power.
Now, the question is becoming clear, has anyone done this kind of thing before and I ask this:
How do you send and recieve data to and from the board and the robot parts (servos, sensors, etc)? I understand the H-bridge and the motor controller parts when used with a MicroController, but how would you do that kind of thing with a PC inside your bot?
1) Don’t leave out the micro controller. Use it as an interface to your sensors and actuators. Use serial communications between PC and micro.
2) Wire your peripherals directly into your PC. Possible interfaces include GPIO, RS232, parallel printer port. The big problem with GPIO is availability and documentation. RS232 is very limited in the number of devices that you can wire directly into it (without actually talking the serial protocol). The parallel port is popular with many tinkerers. I could not possibly comment. Never tried it.
The VGA connector on recent motherboards have I2C signals that you may or may not be able to gain access to and use for communicating with one or more microcontrollers and use the microcontrollers for interfacing servos and motors like rik suggests. It’s not something I’ve tried out myself, but there are descriptions of it out there. A quick search gave this: http://www.paintyourdragon.com/uc/i2c/. If you try it and make it work, please post here about it.
Pondering over your options, option 1 seems the best to me. But as an implementation, I’m wondering about the physical connection. As in just plug a serial cable between the Motherboard and the picaxe (or other reccomended micro controller)?
I envision a DB9 connector at the PC side. Any kind of connector or even soldering at the micro controller side. You may have more worries about electrical voltages, logic levels. RS232 uses positive and negative voltage in excess of 5 Volt. Many microcontrollers only handle levels 0 V and 5 V. Some even lower that to 3.3 V. Use an IC (maxim makes them) to "translate" those levels.
Oh, there are of course micro controller project boards that have an USB connector on board. Not just for reprogramming the chip. Also for serial communications.
Again, this is as far as my knowledge goes. Until you teach me some new tricks that is
