Mobile PC platform for a robot

It depends on your power consumption requirements, but usually something like this works:

There are several others in the market, so google a bit more and you'll able to find what you're looking for.

Cheers

Padu

You could get a large uninterruptable power supply like below for a simple initial setup. Keep it pluged into a light extension cord for testing, and just unplug it when you want to go moble.

Or better yet, get an IDE->CompactFlash adapter. Most CF cards run in one of three modes, including "TrueIDE", which is just an IDE interface. I made my own without using a PCB, but that was out of my sheer bloody-mindedness - it took about 3 hours under the 3x goggles to strip all 40 wires on an IDE cable and solder it to a CF socket, before encasing all those fragile joints in hot-melt glue. I was pretty pleased when it worked!

There are places in the US where you can buy these, but the $30 cost plus postage to Australia wasn't my cup of tea :-). The advantage then is you won't need +12V, because neither MB's nor CF use it.

Clifford Heath.

"Clifford Heath"

Not a good idea if you plan to use regular windows. CF cards have a limited write life, and windows read/write a lot without you even noticing. You're gonna render the CF useless in no time. For a robot though, CF is the best choice (no moving parts, low power consumption, very resistant to shocks). I use it in my small robot with a mini-itx board, but I use windows XP embedded. See, winXPe has this special feature called EWF (enhanced writing filter, or something similar), which is nothing more than a memory buffer. It uses part of your RAM as if it was your hard drive, any writes to the hard drives are interrupted and redirected to memory. It comes with an API, and it is possible to commit the changes to the hard drive at a certain point under your command.

Cheers

Padu

Hmmm. *Very* large sealed lead acid batteries might get you a few minutes of run-time.

Seriously, I would get either a VIA Epia motherboard or a Pentium M motherboard.

A Pentium M motherboard can take up to 100 watts depending on the specifics. At 12 volts that is around 8 amps.

The old Pentiums used a *lot* more power.

I would suggest looking at the Leaf Project for inspiration:

Why on earth would you run Windows in a robot? But you're right, I should have said that this is used to boot Linux to a ramdisk.

Clifford Heath.

This is no longer an issue of suitability of an OS, but availability of tested and working libraries and examples. The "you can do anything in Linux" attitude is remarkable, but not realistic for the average person who doesn't know, or doesn't want to learn, coding requirements for altering Linux. OTOH, with Windows someone with only general Visual Basic programming knowledge can put together a fully functional system with a free copy of Visual Basic Express 2005 and mostly off-the-shelf open source libraries, such as DirectShowNet for vision work. Realizing potential here, Microsoft recently announced an (overdue) SDK for robotics, and there are ad hoc groups within the company doing their own development in robotics, specializing in unique formats of the OS. There's a guy in the Mobile group using Windows-based smart phones to control small robot bases, for example.

No OS flame wars needed here...this is just an observation that Linux does not "own" the embedded space by some open source right, and even Windows -- with its closed, bloated, and commercial nature -- could end up with enough momentum to trivialize Linux for robotics applications. So, the answer to your question is: "Because you can, and there are people publishing their Windows-based robotics code and examples on the Internet."

-- Gordon

I'm thinking about going Windows because I'm building a Leaf robot

They have an impressive software infrastructure that is difficult to beat.

Once I get it going I will convert the sucker to Linux, of course. :)

I can use CLISP for the Lisp once I write a few libraries (or for that matter Armed Bear Common Lisp which is cross- platform). I can use Windows emulators to run the other software until I can write patches for Linux.

I know this seems a little dated but maybe it could help.

Good luck...

You might check pcpowerandcooling.com or powerstream.com They seem to have power supplies for your MOBO that can be fed directly from +12v without the losses of using an inverter before the power supply. If you can run everything from one or two power systems you are better off than having to invert then re-regulate it all back down to working voltages.

Just my opinion...