> Hello Mark, > > On Apr 7, 2013, at 7:24 PM, [email protected] wrote: > >> The PC is still swamped with I/O, especially with the cameras. > > I am wondering, do you need any drivers for the cameras? Switching to ARM, > you should check you have that covered in the R.PI distros.
I'm using the standard v4l2 stuff and I carefully select cameras that perform well. You'd be surprised at how badly cheap USB cameras perform. > > How many cores do you have? I presume it's an older Atom, so 1? you should > be able to swing 4 cores in an AMD chip within the budget we described. I have a dual core hyperthreaded Atom, so it looks like 4 cores, but as you know, hyperthreads suck. I originally had an old VIA 3 800MHZ mini-ITX board, which, lets be honest, is probably matched by a PI today. I try to keep the robot as something that has modern technology. Its one of my hobbies. I just think that the current model design is getting really old. I/O is a HUGE limitation it slows everything down. Distributing that I/O does make sense. So, a PI for each camera, and each PI being a camera sever. On top of that, if I can implement the motor control on a PI, a PI for that as well otherwise keep the Arduino controller and port my interfacing to PI. Using an ethernet switch as a backplane and a number of PIs dual functioning as I/O processor and distributed processor. I could even use the MPI interface to do parallel processing on the PIs with the cameras so that a central path planner only gets processed images. It starts to feel more like a brain, don't you think? The current design is done. It has its limitations. I really do think the future of all computing is by scaling across processing units and what better place to experiment with that than robotics? > > Best -F > > _________________________________________ > -- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish > (Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
