Picking a computer

Given your desires,VB and Bluetooth, there are very few options.
Running Visual Basic, you need some sort of PC Clone. Mini-ITX is
probably as close as you can get, although I don't know if they have
Bluetooth. They do have USB and you could add a Bluetooth Dongle.

--
Randy M. Dumse
www.newmicros.com
Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

Coming back from an off list reply:

If you aren't married to Visual Basic your options widen
considerably.  There are many single boards which have or can have
Bluetooth capabilities. Sparkfun sells a Bluetooth adapter for ~$60
that has TTL serial out. That works well with many single board
computers. I've used that adapter for my Introduction to Robotics
university course, and it worked quite well. But since my company has
developed XBee interfaces to our boards, as well as USB dongles for
the PC, and we like them even better. More power, more range, more
operating mode possibilities.

It really comes down to what you want to do with your robot. If you
aren't concerned with beautiful and precise motion, roughly any micro
will do. To get that beautiful motion, you need quadrature decoders
and PID motion controllers. I recommend our DSP based boards for that,
although PICs and AVRs can also do the job (albeit to a lessor degree
with little processing power left over -  but others would disagree).

On the other hand, if you want to do vision, for instance, those
single boards are really out of the question, and again you need
something system level with huge memory addressing capabilities.

My current thinking is it is best to have a DSP controlling the motors
and motion and odometry, and something Linux (or windows) doing
vision, and other higher level functions.

Of course, ask 10 roboteer's about which computers, and you'll get at
least 15 opinions.

In the end the best computer is the one you want to use. That may not
be the one you know best, as I have previously said, but the next one
you want to learn, picking so you can stick with your choice for
several years into the future without having to again relearn another
one right away.

--
Randy M. Dumse
www.newmicros.com
Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

Have you thought of an TI-83+ Graphic Calculator.  You could access your
control software much easier and it would make mounting it to your base
easier too.

Try here:

http://www.smallrobot.com/scimath.html

They make a small footprint bot that only costs a few hundred in parts thats
calc and kit included.  You might be able to break the kit down a rebuild it
to you needs.  Those clacs turn up on e-bay all the time.

Good luck.