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Toys Hardware

VIA-based Mobile Robot Design For Download 85

Posted by timothy from the smarter-than-roomba dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article at DeviceForge introduces the "PC-bot" -- a new mobile robotics demonstration platform design that is being made available for free download from Roboteq. PC-bot was designed to be highly flexible and extensible so that it can serve as the basis for a wide range of customized mobile robot designs featuring web cameras, motion detection software, and more. Details on the mechanical, electronic, and software design are available at Roboteq's website. Currently the bot runs Windows, but Roboteq expects that one of the first enhancements from the user community will be Linux support." Unfortunately, there's no way to download the RoboteQ motor controller the design requires -- that will cost you about $500.
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VIA-based Mobile Robot Design For Download More

VIA-based Mobile Robot Design For Download

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  • VIA-based? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So does that mean it'll be buggy and incompatible upon release and require monthly 4n1 updates to get working properly by the time it's two revolutions behind the tech curve? :D

  • runs windows? (Score:1, Funny)

    by rd4tech ( 711615 )
    will the 'bot be sentient enough to turn off it's power for good? :)
  • That's CHEAP

    Then again, you could probably get away with some Lego Mindstorm cores and do the same thing.

    Asimo, it ain't.

  • Via is showing the way (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:54AM (#7267573) Homepage
    Intel and AMD may have the fastest processors, but I'm much more interrested in Via's small and cool (low temperature) processors... The possibilities just seem to grow with each generation :)

    The new Via Eden-N [via.com.tw] is especially interesting.
    • Too bad their BIOS programmers make Microsoft dev teams look like bug-busting compatability fanatics. I'd buy a processor by them if it didn't come with a VIA BIOS... although the microcode is probably buggy and incompatible as well.

    • Re:Via is showing the way (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Intel and AMD may have the fastest processors, but I'm much more interrested in Via's small and cool (low temperature) processors...

      Intel and AMD also have low-power (therefore low-temperature) x86 processors, such as laptop chips and the AMD Alchemy line, and there are lots of companies manufacturing low-power non-x86 processors. Many are less powerful than the Via chips, but there are some which are equal or faster.

      But Via is one of the few companies producing products for end-users. I've tried to look
    • It should be pointed out that the small via board for this project doesn't actually use an AMD cpu.
  • hmmmmmm a robot running windows...

    why doesn't that sound like such a great idea?

    oh yeah! that whole fear of becoming borg!

    you call him Longhorn, i'll call him Tex.

  • Macross? (Score:4, Funny)

    by YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT ( 651184 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:55AM (#7267576) Homepage Journal
    Roboteq

    So, does this robot also transform into a jet fighter?

    YLFI

  • Aaahhh yes, but........ (Score:4, Funny)

    by venom600 ( 527627 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:58AM (#7267597) Homepage Journal
    how would it fair over here [robotwars.co.uk]?

    I see no flame throwers or hydraulic crushing devices.
  • Roboteq expects that one of the first enhancements from the user community will be Linux support.

    so Roboteq wants linux users to purchase it for $495, and write their own code for it? Sounds awefully cocky to me. "Buy it, write the software for it, pass it on to us, and we'll distribute it to the masses, and cut $100 or more from our expenses per unit. We'll then market it to the Linux masses, and we may or may not pass that price break on to them, as well."

    is it wishful thinking to hope that these
    • well, at least they aren't outright saying that they don't want linux to run on it.

      it's 495$ for HARDWARE(the motor controller), which is perfectly understandable(the software being available for download, of course, you need a windows license around.. and it's not much use without the hardware).
      • Yeah... Since the interface on the controller they sell has RS-232, it's not like you'd need to write device drivers... just open the serial port and read& write the right values to it. They don't elaborate on the specific signals in their faq, but it does contain enough information to make me believe that such control would be fairly trivial

        http://www.roboteq.com/faq.shtml#serialfaq
  • Unfortunately, there's no way to download the RoboteQ motor controller the design requires

    I downloaded "RoboteQ.molecular.blueprint[45A99B28].bz" last night, and my Zyvex FX3000 nanoassembler burn^H^H^H^Hbuilt it in only 6 minutes! Sure, it's still technically illegal to copy someones "Intellectual Property" (until HR837475 becomes law), but putting food on the table doesn't cost anything anymore, and they got whuffie [everything2.com] from me just the same.

    --

  • Although it would be nice if it took encoder inputs, which would make it useful for industrial applications.
  • To think that one's BSOD is now a MOBILE BSOD. Gives a new meaning to a system "crash!"

  • SRI Centipod is already Linux based (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @01:11AM (#7267654)
    SRI Centipod is also based on VIA technology and already runs on Linux. It was demonstrated at Linuxworld 2003 in San Francisco. clicky [linuxdevices.com]

  • Why not surprise them? (Score:4, Funny)

    by eMartin ( 210973 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @01:36AM (#7267762)
    "Currently the bot runs Windows, but Roboteq expects that one of the first enhancements from the user community will be Linux support."

    Considering that Linux support is added for just about everything, espescially when it's not wanted, why not skip this one just because they're expecting it?

  • WINDOWS == CRASH! (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was startled to see a new and unpredictable form of joke in these comments, implying that the robot would crash because it's powered by windows. You see, Windows crashes. So the robot will. Aha. So funny. I had not heard those implications before.

    It was especially good when somebody implied that your screen would turn blue and the robot would begin a killing rampage. A robot rampaging and crushing Windows users is something I would have thought Linux users would cherish. Oh well.

    Anyway, had you heard th
  • I happened to visit mini-itx.com earlier today. I was rather disturbed to read this article about taking a teddy bear [mini-itx.com], and disassembling and reassembling it as a 800MHz PC. It seems relevant to this topic, in a demented way...

  • remember Erector sets? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:04AM (#7267904) Journal
    I've often thought that Erector Set construction kits would be ideal for custom robots. Unlike Legos they are strong. They are various strips and plates of metal with holes, most of them L-beams, that you bolt tegether as needed. They were sort of the Legos of the 1940's. My dad had a set from his younger years and I used them for science class projects that needed sturdy platforms.

    But, the company bellied up. Maybe some Chinese firm will resurrect them.
    • Ummm, there has never been a time [edmonton.ab.ca] that you could not buy Meccano Erector Sets. Though the original Meccano factory did shut down, other factories in France and Argentina continue to build and sell the sets under a different company name: "Erector". Many of the newer sets have updated (read: plastic) pieces, but you can still get them at most real toy or hobby-type stores and you can (of course) order them online [utoypia.com].
    • UT (Texas) actually spent money printing manuals on stable lego construction for the Intro Electrical Engineering Class (part of the lab is taught with lego mindstorms). I don't think they actually payed anyone to write it, but they did print a ton of copies and bind them up, with covers and everything. The manuals have next to nothing in them about the specs of the RCX module, NQC, or even the horrible "RoboLab" software they actually expect us to use. Tons of stuff about lego drivetrains though...

  • Cheaper solutions (Score:3, Informative)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:06AM (#7267914)
    If you don't want to spend the $500 and want a more affordable solution, try buying some surplus hardware. For example this page has stepper motors and controllers at reasonable prices.
    http://www.alltronics.com/stepper_motors. htm

    And instead of a VIA board you can get a cheap
    80186 board for $69 from http://www.jkmicro.com/products/flashlite186.html

    Okay you can't run Linux on that board but with 1 MB of memory and 33 MHz you can do lots with a robot.

  • Too bad VIA's ITX boards are SHIT for PM (Score:5, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:10AM (#7267930) Homepage Journal
    VIA's Mini-ITX boards might have low power consumption while operating but they are total shit for power management. They leave practically everything they can powered up even during S3 suspend when only ram is supposed to be fully powered. Even when totally powered OFF they operate USB, SuperIO, and PS2 ports at FULL power, no matter what the OS asks for, totally failing their own specifications.

    The boards are capable of pulling up to 2A off of ATX 5VSB in flagrant overconsumption. Even if the power supply is capable of providing that current on 5VSB, providing it continuously without the internal fans operating (which they don't in suspend) could be dangerous. The ATX specification provides for an absolute maximum current draw way below what the average Mini-ITX board draws from 5VSB when idle or off.

    This problem was identified over a year ago after the ITX boards were initially released; however VIA has never issued a single fix for it, although it's apparently not the hardware preventing the fix from being implemented! Needless to say, their customer support in the Mini-ITX department is also shit. Is it so bad to want the board to work as advertised?

    Luckily, I haven't even gotten into the processor or video driver issues, which many people see as an even larger problem than the power issues.. To each his own :) At least VIA has some truthful advertising on one point: the board is indeed a very small 170x170mm!

    ~GoRK

  • Take your $500 dollars and shove it up your.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:51AM (#7268064) Homepage Journal
    pockets. Save it instead, and build your own interfaces using parts from floppy drives, schematics on the web, ect.

    Lately i've been rearing my ugly head at this page [aaroncake.net]. The author has schematics [aaroncake.net] for interfacing it to the LPT port, as well as software [aaroncake.net] examples. I built my own interface using a rapid prototype board.

    For those too scared to venture into building the interface themselves, I found this unit [acscontrol.com] for less than $20 bucks from a company called ACS out in Florida. Unfortunately due to economic conditions, I cannot even afford that, but great looking product guys.

    $500 is tooo much, i'd rather just interface steppers through the LPT and save an extra $380.

  • Some people here have done something like this called beobots [beobots.org], a mobile robot platform with all design specs available through CVS. It's based on a highly adaptable and biologically based vision toolkit.
  • Parallax sells (http://www.parallax.com/ ) pic based microcontrollers designed for hobbyists - they are great for robotics. They are fairly expensive for microcontrollers, but you could still do a hell of a lot more than this POS via will be ever able to for $500 and the power consumption will also be much less. Then again you could always just wire EDM yourself a small wankel rotary, hook that up to a generator and run off nitromethane...

  • Sounds familiar... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kris0r ( 453555 )
    Actually, in the ARL (Algorithmic Robotics Lab) at RPI, I'm working on a research robot based on the Via Epia ME6000. In fact, we've just switched away from the Ampro Encore PP1 (a powerpc board) because of Ampro's complete lack of support and general flakiness of the board. So far I'm reasonably pleased with the Via board, though we'll see how it works out in terms of power consumption (though even with conservative power usage estimates we still expect to get 3+ hours, down from about 4.5-5 with the pow
  • i think that robot will kill anybody it see if you dont install its driver currectly ! :) like VIA chips !

  • Can we say Overkill? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @06:47AM (#7268741) Homepage
    Unless the bot is going to do some image recognition or running advanced AI this is so overkill it isn't funny. Plus it will have a runtime that is insanely short for any real research to be done.

    I made a "overpowered" robot 5 yearts ago with a baby 386 motherboard and the 1st generation wireless networking. and even with the AI I was messing with and basic image recognition on linux with a B&W quickcam, and I still had lots of processing power left over.

    I was getting almost a full day runtime from the bot (depending on how much the motors were on. if you ran full tilt or worse started and stopped repeatedly you could kill the lead acid on board in 3 hours.)

    and I spent ALOT less on my robot... including motors making my own motor controller and finding the 1st gen 802.11 wireless isa cards.

    and they leave out important things like sensors...
  • Have a look at this Libre Hardware/Software design: PINO [jst.go.jp] Bipedal walking Robot -- and Free as in Freedom from top to bottom.
  • We've been running a contest that uses similar hardware. Take a look at http://maslab.lcs.mit.edu [mit.edu]. Our platform [mit.edu] uses a slow (but more power-efficient than the epia) Natsemi GX-1 (300MHz x86). We've built a custom robot controller board (4 motor drivers, support for quad-phase optical encoders, analog and digital i/o, etc). We're not mass-producing them, but should have a few extras at the end of January. Should be much cheaper than the $500 those folks talk about.

    We use the CPU power to do vision pr
  • I am in the process of building a prototype based on stepper motors and stepper controllers. The controllers cost a little, but eliminate the feedback requirement. These controllers can be daisychained on a single serial port. See: http://www.stepperboard.com/ The commands are simple 1000G to go 1000 steps clockwise and -1000G to go reverse. Speed is adjustable as well as a programmed speed ramp up and ramp down. I am using Redhat with a pair of webcams talking to the controllers thru the serial port.

  • ... check out the Open Automaton Project [sourceforge.net]. This project includes electronic circuit schematics, software and documentation you can use to build an intelligent PC-based mobile for home or office environments.

    The prototype is also based on on the same VIA mainboard as the RoboteQ robot.

  • Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aminorex ( 141494 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @01:14PM (#7272375) Homepage Journal
    it is VIA-based. And VIA will not let you
    know what you are buying when you buy their
    products. You see, if you gave customers
    your datasheets, they might be able to actually
    use the products, which could lead to all sorts
    of legal complications. It's much better to
    just sell them a product they can't use.
  • Anybody actually read the spec mentioned? A horrible FPP in that it pointed just at the main page (the reference is here [roboteq.com]), but the technology behind it is kind of neat.

    While there is something to be said for scrounging parts and banging together whatever crap hardware I can find to do the job, its not a very scientific method. Being able to design something that is replicatable is a far more worthy project -- otherwise all your design work gets locked up in -your- project and crap on everyone else.

    Whil

  • Mind you, it is pretty fancy. :)

    For those on a budget and would be using Radio Controllers with PPM modulation, or feel like creating PPM modulated signals out the parallel port (or with a bit of PIC magic), Schulze electronic speed controllers would be a good candidate.

    Granted, they're not as intelligent since they don't have programmable serial ports and such, but they do allow you a much greater range of battery and motor choice. Schulze also make sensor and sensorless brushless motor controllers, thei

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