Microprocessor

Bob X

Just wondering if anyone knows of a good microprocessor (I'm looking at getting into robotics as a hobby) that is preferably not programmed in basic? Thanks

Douglas Troy

This isn't an answer, but I wanted to be certain you're aware of this: Robotics Studio[^]

:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
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Richard Andrew x64

Hi Bob, I have some experience in the hobby and my favorite microcontroller for small jobs comes from Atmel. Their AVR line of microcontrollers are programmed in C, and are much more feature-rich than the PIC line. http://www.atmel.com[^] For larger, more capable robots, I have just begun exploring the line of controllers from Rabbit Semiconductor. They are single-board controllers that are extremely capable. Different models offer TCP and Ethernet connectivity! http://www.rabbitsemiconductor.com/[^] Keep us up to date on your adventures in the hobby, I would love to help out when I can! I think it's a great hobby.

-------------------------------- "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing" -- Edmund Burke

thebeekeeper

I'll also recomend the AVR series and most of the stuff from Rabbit. I also like TI MSP430s, especially if you're looking for low power which can be an advantage in a robot (since i don't know how you'd plug it in), although since it's running motors, your processor is going to be the least of your power issues. i have seen one running with an apple as it's power supply, which would be a pretty cool thing to do with a robot. TI usually has good development tools as well, and with those or AVRs you can get the gcc tool set for free.

Ed Poore

Bob X wrote:

good microprocessor

Depends on what you want to do, we use the M16C[^] alot for Pi Logic's systems, very low power and a huge number of I/O ports (80+).

Jim Crafton

I hear the 8086 is going to be flying off shelves soon! Seriously, I can't help you with this, unfortunately.

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Bob X

I know about it, but have never run into anyone who has used it.

Bob X

Richie308 wrote:

Keep us up to date on your adventures in the hobby, I would love to help out when I can! I think it's a great hobby.

Will try to do so :D

Tim Craig

PIC and AVR get used a lot by the people in the Home Brew Robotics club here in the valley. http://www.hbrobotics.org/[^] The AVR has the advantage of having a free toolset. The drawback to AVR used to be the lack of availability in DIP packages if you're looking to build your own boards. Surface mount can be done by hobbyists but it's not as easy. Everyone in the club is looking for a good 32 bit solution to use as a supervisory controller. Right now the club president is working on a set of small intelligent boards that can be linked together with a simple ribbon cable bus to form a distributed system. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RoboBricks2/[^] The lower level boards use the PIC16 series processors. The controller module is designed to accept various PIC or AVR processors. I'll be in the thick of soldering them up in a week or so. Ah, the smell of burning fingers.... :laugh:

Tim Craig

Oh, I almost forgot. From a technical viewpoint the Propeller chip from Parallax is interesting. Several people at HBR are playing with it and I scored a developer kit at the Embedded Systems Conference this week because I'm such a sterling fellow. ;P It's 8 32 bit cores on a single low cost chip. The only drawback in my mind is that there's no C/C++ support for it yet. The high level language is Spin but it's also programmable in assembler. http://www.parallax.com/[^]