robotics

You should look up your local robotics club and join. Then add value to the team by putting your knowledge to work.

Wayne

If your on your own the easiest way is too first pick out a family of microcontrollers and learn them the most popular are pic's and avr's. Im sorry to disagree but stay away from basic stamps, theyre wonderful for your first project but you WILL move up to a real microcontroller and then youll wonder why you wasted money on a stamp. then you should learn the ins and outs of the microcontroller once you can program it your own imagination will come dream up your bot. and READ go through newsgroups learn basic circuits, these are the building blocks, me im biased toward discretes instead of ic's learn the op amp the op amp is your best friend I know this sounds overwhelming but it will come all by itself seemingly with no effort from yourself First get your controller, programmer, compiler and learn it mikroelektronika.com is where i got my compiler and programming board best bang for the buck in my opinion if you have questions fire away im here to help

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Revealing my ignorance here, so take pity on an old gray hair trying to stay in today's technology sandbox.

If I hear you correctly, you are suggesting that a novice focus on learning how to control power switching before getting too involved with programming I/Os through devices such as the BASIC stamp, because at some time in the future a Centronics cable from a standard computer with something like Bill Gates' new Robotic Suite will do it better?

I've been looking for this kind of setup since Lotus discontinued the 'Factory' function in their software!

Or have I missed your point completely?

Wayne Ever ready to learn even with dunce cap if required.

Yeah you got the right idea. What i meant was the pic microcontrollers and the and the avrs are so much more powerful with a unit price so much cheaper than the stamps that the only reason i believe a person buys a stamp is that they didnt realize what could be done with a real microcontroller. Take a look at the stamp 30 odd bytes of ram dont really go that far. For about 7 bucks you can have a pic 16 f877a clocked at 20 mhz it gives you 5 million instructions per second on board pwm a/d converters uart spi i2c, more than you can use in peripheral features, 8k of program space and 368 bytes of ram plus 30 i/0 lines. They are more expensive to get into but if electronics is going to be a real hobby for you youll love em. The little pics the 12f family i use them everywher 2k of program space 128 bytes of ram and 6 i/0 lines. For me they take the place of complicated logic, with an on board comparator with programable voltage reference and a 10 bit a/d you would be surprised how useful the thing is, get this the price 2 dollars, you can afford to accidentally stick it in the socket backwards. the avrs are supposed to be a different flavor i havent played with them much because i invested in a programmer and compiler for the pic family, but i get the impression that they dont have as many special features but they run one instruction per clock cycle so if you clock it at 10mhz you get 10 million instructions per second, thats power. the nice thing too is if you invest in a real basic compiler or a c compiler you get interrupts, procedure based programming arrays, structure based programming, and other handy things that make it easier to have your project do what you want it too see what i mean why stamp it to death when you can pic it apart (sry i had to)