>As many of you know, I have a robot project. >http://www.linuxpcrobot.org/ >Over the years I have tried to keep the robot as a viable platform and >maintain development costs to the sub $500 range.
Well, I would say that the $500 is somewhat arbitrary in that it doesn't seem to take into account the time and energy that others would need to assemble your system and debug it. If you want a design that raises the material cost a little bit but *dramatically* drops the labor others need to spend to take your design and implement it themselves, then you might consider the zedboard. http://www.zedboard.org/content/key-features Zedboard. Dual ARM® Cortex-A9 MPCore, half a gig of DDR3, ethernet, usb, HDMI, and over a million gates equivaent of FPGA fabric. You can run linux on the processors and put all the vision processing hardware you want in the FPGA fabric. You'll also have available stuff like CANBUS ports, so you can use standard motor controllers such as this: http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro/motor-controllers/217-3367.html Then you can run the control software in the ARM on linux, but have a motor controller that will keep the robot from burning itself out if the software crashes or gets stuck in a loop or something. _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
