Mini-ITX as robot brain?

Take a look at:

for EPIA Power Simulator.

Paul.

And their even smaller form factor, the nano-ITX:

-C

Been there and done that. it works good. What I do is use a ISOPOD

here's some links you can check out.

Are you running Linux?

I just ordered my M10000 and would appreciate any hints needed to get it up and running.

-- D. Jay Newman

I use Windows XP, Linux didn't support the USB ports with the USB devices I wanted to use. No fuss no mess, no writing my own drivers, no having to recompile the OS, etc. Like RTFM under Linux means anything, hundreds of pages of documentation for the wrong version of everything. Of course if your a "expert" fanatic programmer and live eat sleep Linux, you shouldn't have any problems. Every other year of so, I make an attempt at getting Linux do so something useful, then eventually I give up.

Now Solaris was pretty good, I just got tired of hav>

How do you get Windows XP to not do things like index the whole darm disk drive whiel you are tryinf to time the return-pulse from an ultrasonic rangefinder?

Or, how do you even talk to the parallel-port from a C program?

Or, how do you send servo-pulses to a hobby servo motor?

I could never figure those things out with Windows (any-version) so I just swapped to Linux, and I'm good-to-go.

I just have no idea what windoes is up to, no process-control, things just run whenever they want to and I can;t turn anything off and know that it's off for sure.

And how do I get a program started up without logging in to a graphics terminal?

I can run Linux with no graphics card at all, and things run just fine.

Sorry, but I'm a little too stupid after 20 years running UNIX to be able to figure out how to do anything with Windows.

I use a ISOPOD from

Honestly, I personally have never seen a real Linux based robot in any setting other than a "static" display. It seems everyone was off still writing code for it to get it to work. of course there seemsto be a lot of neat robots that will be coming out down the road after a while. I tried to get a Linux based robot to work and failed, maybe someone else was more successful. More power to them. Way to go.

You can turn off indexing. Pretty easy. You can also turn off most services. Sure, Windows XP is not a real-time OS, but neither is Linux. There are some real-time extensions for Linux, and there are some also available for Windows. The main difference, of course, is price.

Not that difficult. A very often-asked question, actually. You can write your own driver or use one of the many freely available drivers.

The same way you would with Linux. You just have to learn Windows programming, just like you learned Linux programming over the years.

Smart decision, though. ;-)

Totally wrong. You can do whatever you want with the so-called "task-manager" on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. And the built-in Administration tools allow you to turn any service on or off.

For instance, you'd write a service. There are other ways, too.

Ok, this one is a bit trickier with Windows, but not impossible at all.

Well, of course, if you have that much experience with Un*x-like systems, you're better off using it.