Replacement processor

[PaulP]

If anyone with a bit of controller savvy could have a lot at this...

http://www.rabbitsemiconductor.com/products/kits/

Would it be possible to leave the existing controller boards in a KHR and connect the serial to one of the ports on these microcontrollers.

The PC would then program the micro which would in turn control the servos through the existing interface.

[edmen]

yes , rabbit MCU's are very much capable of governing the controller on board the KHR , question is, can the khr's controller hold that many precoded behaviors, I assume you want to have more then just a few actions programmed into the controller.

[PaulP]

I wasnt intending on storing any code in the KHR. I was thinking rather of just sending the move commands from the Rabbit to the KHR controller in much the same way that the pc can send move commands.

The complex logic could then be written in C to the Rabbit.

It may even be possible to store the actions in the Rabbit and load them as required though I think time may be the issue their. Given that mechanical movement is always the slowest part of a robot it should be possible to treat the behaviours almost like a macro.

Also, as one of the boards comes with 8 of 24 bit A/D convertors it might be possible to fit in place of the KHR sensor board

[edmen]

hey totally possible then , you can even setup a network interface to it if you get the network enabled rabitcore. sounds good,

ed.

[PaulP]

Trouble is network needs cable on these. Most of the cards support 4 or more serial links so was thinking bluetooth in on one port, serial link to servo controller on another, one has to be dedicated to programming otherwise you cant work in-situ.

Would be nice to got Wireless Network as the house is fully wireless but I did see a small serial to class 1 bluetooth that claimed to have a very large range that might do the trick.

[slashsplat]

Do some research into the latency of BTooth. Seems to be a lot slower than equivalent speed RF. I have been eyeing a pair of radios at Parallax for similar purposes http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=28180 The speed is limited to 19.2K but my experience with this chip is that they respond REALLY fast. 19.2 should be 2 or 3 bytes per ms, and the hardware is full duplex, with comm in both directions simulatneously.

[edmen]

I agree , there are high end class blue tooths you might want to look into , the commands must be tokenized quiet quickly through the blue tooths wireless link you should find out if you can accommodate for that kind of bandwidth draw.

[PaulP]

I did consider wireless rather than bluetooth but didnt find much in the way of hardware when I searched. Best have another look on the net and see what comes up.

[PaulP]

something like this perhaps

http://www.quatech.com/catalog/airborne ... es_emb.php

[edmen]

http//:www.sparkfun.com

they have some great stuff including wide range of wirless components

ed.

[PaulP]

they sell the same unit but charge extra for a pretty case that will get ripped off and thrown away