Robots and LCD Displays

In my opinion, unless the display is capable of 800x600 or 1024x768 XGA it isn't going to be of much use. Just about all the modern OS's have pretty much stopped supporting 640x480 VGA displays. Now with a nice 800x600 or 1024x768 color LCD panel and a nice mini keyboard, you would have something. I have a 640x480 monochrome amber LCD panel, and it barely works with Windows now; with a couple of versions of Linux that I have; one Linux flavor refuses to use it and doesn't have any drivers for it,; the other flavor installs, but when you reboot, the display goes all bonkers and it unreadable or useable. I suppose I could use a old copy of Windoes 95 or Windows 3.11, or a old copy of a old Linux distribution, but they don't support any of the Via Mini-ITX's board features and stuff. Thus it probably wouldn't work at all. Maybe something like a version of imbedded Linux or maybe Windows CE would work better. But I never tried them. Thus I think maybe a 12 inch XGA compatible LCD panel would be the way to go. Now if the display is video compatible, it would be handy for a TV camera display.

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

"If you can read this message on this LCD, then I can kill you."

a serial graphic lcd would be rather usable, there are drivers available for all sorts of parallel and serial mono displays.

To convey "emotion". Draw a face on it, have it convey how it is "doing" with facial cues. A "happy" robot is likely not spinning in place, has a map of where it is, has sufficient power etc...

When it is operating below nominal, convey this in a specific fashion. If its motors are straining, make it look strained, if it is low on power, make it tired looking.

Do they have any small displays with a resolution high enough? I know the trend nowdays is bigger and badder and not lean and mean unfortunatley. The thing with a robot is that you really don't have the real estate for a huge display, and the bigger the display the heavier and the more power it sucks up for the backlight, it is simply overkill. PDAs use small lower resolution screens and most can even have the backlight shut off for power saving. I think the highest resolution is 640 x 480 for a few Pocket PCs. If you got rid of all of the flashy stuff in windows you could run it on such a display. Unfortunatlely I doubt it could be done, with conventional windows installs. I wonder if there is a version of windows for embedded systems like machine control displays that use less res?

Well with Windows XP, I can get it (Via Mini-ITX) to run OK with a old 12" diagonal, 640x480 VGA, amber, monochrome monitor. But everytime you reboot, the OS complains about it a lot, stating that it really would like 800x600 at least. Plus some apps don't display all that well at that resolution either, but it does work OK with Visual Basic though. But that 12" monitor tends to suck about 2+ amps at 12vdc. I am planning on replacing my son's 14" LCD monitor with a larger LCD model and using it instead on my big robot. It looks to draw a lot less power than the old amber monitor too.

The versions of Linux that I have just didn't seem to have any support for a

Using Windows CE on an appropriate board would be nice, but the boards cost more than just buying out a complete WinCE PDA machine. But Windows XP on a Via Mini-ITX board runs circles around the PDA machines.

I have seen some small 8", maybe10" and 12" wide screen 800x600 LCD panels in some laptops (or was it a DVD player?), so there may be some small monitors (like for medical systems) out there someplace.

That's a cool thought, reminds me of the RoboCop 2 movie. Or was it the crazy robot in Lexx?

How about something similar to these for screens:

I am not sure that the robot software that you use could work with this but it sounds kind of good. You can even have the OS on a flash card instead of a HD for power saving, and you can divert the swap files to RAM so that it won't wear out the flash media. It almost sounds perfect for robots.

All of this stuff is expensive but if something comparable exists for less it could be good, what do you think?

Sure it will run circles around PDAs. But it will also suck power much faster too. You can't leave an ITX on for days without a charge, it will only last hours. If you are looking for a bot (maybe your are not) that can be on standby and run programs that wake up the unit at a certain time etc than those boards are not practical. That is unless you have it plugged in all of the time. But if you are going to have it tethered to a cord all of the time then it kind of defeats the whole "autonomous" robot thing, at least to me. Maybe you can have a PDA connected to the PC part and have it communicate? The PDA for turning on the robot at certain scheduled times etc. That would take some coding though.

Dave

Yeah that LCD looks pretty promising. I haen't tried it yet, but that looks like one I was looking at a while back. Yes Embedded Windows XP is supposed to the the upgrade from Windows CE, but I haven't messed with it yet. Note how they only support 800x600 or better screen resolutons. Which means it'll be in the new generation PDA like devices.

This is quite an advance over the robot "Robot" on Lost In Space, that only had a translucent chest panel that would light up as it spoke.

You definitely need a color display so the robot can have the obligatory BSOD.

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It would probably work OK, but it depends on your display device, and whether it supports 640x480 or not. Or whether you can get it to work at the lowest 640x480 level or not. Some display boards or OS's just don't support it anymore. It is a interesting LCD panel to use as they are getting a lot cheaper now that the PS1's are obsolete.

BSOD Stay away from windoze. Not into Shrug And Prey in my robots. At least the mac people get a little ticking timebomb...

Sell sponsorships to help defray your costs. Put the sponsors commercial messages on screen. I'm sure people will just love it.