another linux robot platform

- T
- The Artist Formerly Known as K
  
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posted
18 years ago

Thu, May 19, 2005 1:40 PM

It would have to be real currency -- but I and I sez there are 62 Jamaican Dollars to 1 US Dollar, mon.

If you're just looking to boot DOS, there's a ton of used stuff available for free. If you're looking for new stuff that boots DOS, there are a variety of SBCs that do this:

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is an 80186-based product. No need to install anything -- just boot it up. You can run DOS, or (I think) uC-OS will run on this as well if you need pre-emptive multitasking. $69.00, quantity 1. This assumes you make your own serial cable and supply your own wall-wart. The devkit is 109 with this stuff included, but these ancillary items are simple to make.

This may be more useful than the router option, as it has a good bit of I/O other than ethernet/wlan, but I don't really know what your application is. If you need networking (and nothing else) the router is probably a better option.

Really -- there are a lot of options. Occasionally surplus SBCs pop up on the market as well. Use google and ebay -> search for "Single Board Computer".

Otherwise, old laptops are practically free these days -- even pentiums.

Cheers - m

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- aiiadict
  
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posted
18 years ago

Thu, May 19, 2005 4:06 PM

Hell money delivered by "paypal", a midget go comes to your doorstep, rings the bell, and sings a song as he hands over your evil $$.

Rich

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- Guy Macon
  
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posted
18 years ago

Thu, May 19, 2005 4:50 PM

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- abefij
  
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posted
18 years ago

Fri, May 20, 2005 10:07 PM

I recently picked up a LinkSys NSLU2 (266MHz ARM XScale which runs linux, has built in networking, USB, a serial header, and tons of flash(32Mb) on the board) for $55 on Ebay. Part of the file system is on the built in flash, and part is on a sandisk cruzer 256 usb flash drive ($25 at staples after rebate). Using an i2c driver with the clock chip will enable you to talk to a microcontroller(sensors, motors etc), if you need to use the serial connection for something else.

More info here:

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Don't bother sending any $

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- unknown user
  
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posted
18 years ago

Fri, Jun 17, 2005 9:54 PM

In order to run the software (available on the sf site

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), you need linux... And the code includes an implementation of a language similar to Lisp (CycL) for sillogism processing, as well as a few shell scripts, and requires festival for speech... With CycL, it kills my PII laptop system every time it caches the MTs, so if you don't want the robot stalling every time the brain decides to backup, you might want to use something better than a PII 200mhz. The current version works pretty well, but it's necessary to write your own version of the robot control script (replacing the demo one), but with documentation in one hand (or window) and the script in the other, one could probably make a reasonably useful and interesting robot setup in a couple days. I'm sorry that I haven't uploaded the hardware piece yet... I'll try to remember to do that when I get home. It's basically a couple of H-bridges connected to pins on the parport (pin 1=left motor, pin 2=right) with the strobe (pin 0) tied directly to a power source.