Does someone already have done some wifi communication (11/54) with his/her robot in that understanding that the robot was not driven by a laptop (Win/Linux) but by a controller (atmel/motorola/...)
I have not done it yet, but I have a plan for my new robot. I plan to use an ITX mobo with a 802.11 PCI card w/ external antenna. The ITX mobo can be powered with 12 VDC using a DC-to-DC converter. My ITX board will talk to my main PIC controller with RS232.
Similar thing could be done with a PDA too - wifi compact flash card and serial out to controller. The advantage is the PDA is smaller and lighter and has its own built in power supply.
I was thinking of miniitx but I'm now leaning towards pda.
True about the PDA. What I didn't mention is that the mini-ITX will also be serving a web cam image from the attached USB camera. It will host an Apache server with Webcam 1-2-3 software.
Thanks for the replies. I did do some research the past few weeks on this issue and came up with some... more questions. Thank you Internet! I hope you all can give me some feedback to give me a jumpstart on this.
The basic question was, How do you connect your controller with a WiFi?
First, I don't want to use ITX Mobo or Mini-ITX or PDA's because they are too expensive for what I'm trying to do. I don't want to use an OS as an underlying system. The reason for this is that I'm hoping that I can produce these robots in a cheap way and that i don't want the OS's capriciousness in development and running mode. Sorry for that, I just want a clean robot (don't shoot me for this).
Second, I want to build some small stuff with an AVR Atmel controller (yep, good old asm). But I don't think that Atmel doesn't got any controllers that are Ethernet enabled and for the record Java is not my kind of stuff (so I forgetting JStik, but it was nice to hear about it Jay, was new for me)
I must say, I never heard about "EthernetWiFi bridges" in controller land. Is there some way of a "SerialWiFi bridge" or "SerialUSBWiFi bridge". And how can you control this, some samples would be nice! A shot under my azz in a good direction will do also :)
Some companies sell some "SerialWiFiWiFiSerial" connections, but again these are not cheap.
The reason for the WiFi implementation is to a) Send all my robots debugging info to my laptop b) Change some values into robots running mode c) (in very small caps... let robots see(WiFi) each other and send there values to each other... very very small caps! it's more a caps dream)
Hoop to get some reactions on this J.
PS: if you read it like : let robots WiFi each other... it's kind of nice to hear :)
ZWorld/Rabbitsemiconductor has a WiFi application kit, which includes devboard, CPU module, CompactFlash adapter, CF WiFi Card and software.
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This allows you to design/build WiFi enabled embdded controllers suitable for mobile robotics. Rabbits even have quadrature encoder inputs (2) an PWM outputs (4), suitable for motor control.
Netburner also has a WiFi solution.
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but I have not used either.
WiFi is a bit of a power hog (300-400mA for transmit), but having the ability to connect your (or collection of) robot to 'net and being able to talk to it from a Laptop/PDA is pretty cool. Besides, the actuators in robotics applications are likely to be a bigger concern.
I have build a WiFi solar powered datalogger. An article about it should be out in the November issue of Circuit Cellar.
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