.NET robotics controller
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I like the look of Netduino - thanks It looks like they have a pretty active community so maybe I will ask some questions there and see if they think I am mad....
www.it-workplace.com
"If a man speaks in a forest where there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"Hi, The Netduino is a great little tinker board however is limited in it's IO ability. As a clear frontrunner I would suggest the Fez Panda 2 the same website for GHI electronics has alternatives. I would strongly recommend staying away from Microsoft's ".NET Gadgeteer" it is simply the same FEZ based board however at 2 -3 times the cost. tinyclr FEZ (Frekin Eazy) boards have been around a little longer than Netduino and has a much stronger community. The advantage of both board are they are Arduino compatible which means the shields that plug into the the top will work. Great as you can get cheap ones of ebay however be careful as you must re-map pins for the much cheaper ones. The reason I suggest the Panda II as well is that you can use these shield however with the extra header you can reduce the space your require. To help sceptics here is a few comparesents
FEZ PANDA II | NETDUINO
72MHz. 32-bit ARM7 processor | 48MHz, 32-bit ARM7 processor
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148KB for user application | 128 KB for user application
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62KB RAM | 60KB RAM
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54x Digital I/O ports | 20x Digital I/O portsand thats just for starters as the size of your project is quite substantial and complex the PANDA II will give you the extra where ever you need it and only for an extra $5 or £5. Hope this helps you on your way, Cheers Chris
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I think you'll like netduino. My son (age 13) and I have been having a lot fun with it for the last couple of months.
J W
Sweet! Thanks for the suggestion. I bet I'll have some fun with it :)
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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I have a robotics project that I would like to have a go at with my son but I have no idea how to get started on sourcing hardware so I thought I would ask . Basically I would like to build a remote control vehicle BUT rather than use standard radio control I would like to use a mobile phone as the controller via the internet. The logic behind this is that it would be possible to control the robot from any location and not be limited by the range of an individual radio device - a bit like the Rovio robot. To do this I am going to need some kind of controller that can connect to the internet, preferably using mobile technology rather than wireless networking, and which can handle control of servos plus video streaming. Not being a hardware guy I am having trouble working out what to search for (assuming that such technology exists). My skill set is .NET so something that can be made to work via web services would be ideal. Obviously the further we get away from .NET the longer the learning curve is likely to be (my son is 14 so we need to be able to get results at a reasonable rate to keep his interest). So - does anyone out there in codeproject land have any thoughts on where to source hardware for this kind of project?
www.it-workplace.com
"If a man speaks in a forest where there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"When using a cell phone or tablet to control a robot you need to think first about an interface to hardware. How is the device going to talk to the outside world? Most robotics hardware is going to revolve around a micro controller of some sort. This could be a Parallax.com Basic Stamp II or Propeller board or some form of Arduino. These devices communicate via a USB or Serial interface. So that is what you need to think about how to make a phone speak serial to a micro controller. If the mobile device is an Android OS there is a free app you can get from the app store, type Basic Stamp and you should find a serial communication program that will allow the earbud speakout to be used to send serial data to an external device. The external device then needs to be programmed to act on the serial data from your Android bases device. .Net can certainly be used to control a robot, Visual Studio gives you everything you need to send serial data to a micro controller. You can even added vision system, text to speech and speech recongition with .Net running on a laptop, desktop or netbook. I use Visual Studio for this with my robots.