On-board versus Wireless
One of the interesting things about building an advanced robot today is there are so many choices available. I've been participating in a thread on RoboSavvy with another person who wants to use the Bioloid kit for building an autonomous robot, but doesn't want on-board processing. Instead, he wants a high-speed wireless link to the Bioloid bus over Wifi, so he (and his students) can program and operate the robot from a PC.
So, to accomplish that, you would need:
The only real issue with this kind of a setup versus using a gumstix is the latency introduced with the wireless link. Since I'm going to be doing dynamic balancing, having low-latency response is important. Having the brain run on my laptop instead of on the gumstix would hugely simplify development of it, and I could go a lot further, given the massive amount more memory, processing power, and hard drive space I would have available.
Everything would be easier to code and debug, because I could have interactive user interfaces that run in real-time along side the controller, to monitor exactly what it is doing and what it is seeing. A down side is the Wifi module chews power (probably close to half an amp), so the battery won't last as long. But batteries aren't hard to swap on a robot like this, so I don't view that as a huge downside.
So, to accomplish that, you would need:
- Bioloid robot (obviously)
- ATMega128 board
- Wifi module
The only real issue with this kind of a setup versus using a gumstix is the latency introduced with the wireless link. Since I'm going to be doing dynamic balancing, having low-latency response is important. Having the brain run on my laptop instead of on the gumstix would hugely simplify development of it, and I could go a lot further, given the massive amount more memory, processing power, and hard drive space I would have available.
Everything would be easier to code and debug, because I could have interactive user interfaces that run in real-time along side the controller, to monitor exactly what it is doing and what it is seeing. A down side is the Wifi module chews power (probably close to half an amp), so the battery won't last as long. But batteries aren't hard to swap on a robot like this, so I don't view that as a huge downside.
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