Anybody had much experience with using single board computers (SBCs) in robotics? Dale mentioned he was working with a BeagleBoard which looks pretty cool, and the Roboard looks good too (if a bit pricier) specifically for robotics. Anything else worth looking at?
I’m also investigating using a x86-compatible SBC board in my (future) robot, for various uses (sequencing, wireless connectivity, voice control). I’ll be using a Wafer 5820 board, which is a common board with Cyrix MII-300Mhz CPU, and all of the standard ports for this use. It cost me $50 off a computer forum and was previously used in a bank ATM. It’s about the size of a 3.5" hard disk in terms of it’s footprint (but much thinner) - a little bigger that what I’d like, but obviously cheaper than most out there. If successful I might upgrade to a VIA Pico ITX board.
The Beagleboard looks great and well-supported, I’d not heard of it before. From what I’ve read about the Roboard though, it’s too expensive and poorly supported. The Vortex86 SBC boards (which is what the Roboard is based upon), whilst simpler, are also out there. I recall DealExtreme sell a mini computer based off this which is quite cheap, certainly much cheaper than the proper Roboard.
What I’m probably waiting for is that Linux “PC on a stick” mini computer, to be released in a year or so.
The Roboards are a bit pricey for what you get eh. I’d be more tempted if there was an option without the mini-PCI socket too. I just like the idea of being able to drive servos straight off the board, and being able to consolidate everything down to one board, rather than having the SBC + SSC-32. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, would be nice though.
Got a link to the embedded Linux boards? Sounds a bit like the gumstix boards.
The one I mean is the Raspberry Pi - $25 micro computer, possible release 2011!
… the Roboards look good on paper, just I haven’t read many good things about them. I’m not a programmer at heart, so the SSC-32 + SBC might be the go for me, initially, to learn the language and teach myself from there.
Then again, I also collect PDAs - peering over at my Atari Portfolio, this might also be suitable!
JB
Hey that looks great! Will have to keep an eye on that project for sure.
It is nice to have all the servo movement stuff taken care of by the SSC, but for a hexapod (what I’m building on) I’d need to build a gait engine for the SBC if it replacing the Botboard II anyway.
A PDA could be a good way to go too if the device does serial (or if you can get an SDIO serial adapter or something). Actually that’s not a bad idea, I could probably do that with my old Palm Lifedrive - 416MHz Xscale w/64MB RAM, 4GB microdrive, wifi, bluetooth, etc… actually that is a really good idea haha
No dice, wifi doesn’t work on Palm w/Linux :<
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