Single Board Computer Intellect
by paloskar on Jan.18, 2011, under Electronics
The TI micro-controller I used for managing the robot’s walk proved to fall short in processing power. This is why I started looking for a replacement that would allow plenty of MIPS for controlling the servos and for other, higher level cognitive tasks. This is why I decided to get a small single board computer (SBC). Generic SBCs did not seem to have dedicated outputs for controlling servos. Because of this, I decided to go with a SBC designed specifically for robots: the Roboard RB-100. It runs on 1GHz and has 256Mb of RAM. It has plenty of PWM servo outputs, COM ports, I2C, USB, SPI, RS-485, A/D inputs, LAN, etc. I mounted the SBC on the back of the robot.
The Roboard has an mini PCI slot that can be fitted with a graphics card, wireless card or any other standard mini PCI device. As mass storage, a Micro SD card can be used. The device is fully PC compatible. I installed a regular version of Windows XP on it. I develop programs in Microsoft Visual Studio IDE on a remote PC and transfer the compiled output files to the device through LAN using Windows Remote Desktop. I write applications in C and use GTK for defining the user interface. The Roboard proved to be a very good choice. It worked exactly as advertised without any issues. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a robot development platform that will provide enough processing power for almost any imaginable task. I will write more about the higher level processing capabilities that I implemented in future posts.
