iPhone/iPod touch as bioloid interface??

[billyzelsnack]

While walking my kids today I had a crazy thought..

Mount an iPhone in a Bioloid!

My preferable setup would be for the iPhone to talk bidirectional with the Bioloid ( usb, firewire, something else? ) and also the iPhone talk bidirectional with a PC ( 3g/wifi ). The pinout for the connector is available, but I'm not sure if you have the necessary access via the SDK ( I'll see if I can find anything tonight as I'm in the iPhone dev program. )

For not much weight/size this setup could give you a Bioloid with..

Semi-fast processor
Nice output display with touch screen interface
Camera
Wifi access
Accelerometer
GPS

The iPhone is pretty expensive to own right now. In the US it's a minimum of $200 + $70 a month for two years.

However.. You can get an iPod Touch for much cheaper ( $300 ) and it gives you everything an iPhone has minus phone, camera, and GPS. Rumors are that the next refresh ( in September maybe ) will bring a lower price point as well as adding in the camera and GPS.

( btw. Craigslist is a good place to find the iPod Touch. I got a brand new one for $225 a couple weeks back. )

I'm going to seriously consider going this route for my Mechwars entry!!

[billyzelsnack]

oh looky!

iPhone Serial Port I/O with source

http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=18904

[billyzelsnack]

More info..

http://jima4media.wiki.zoho.com/iPhone-Contents.html

---------

ARM1176JZF-S based CPU Subsystem with Java acceleration Engine
16/16KB I/D Cache, 16/16KB I/D TCM
533/667MHz Operating Frequency
One 8-bit ITU 601/656 Camera Interface of up to 4M pixel for scaled and 16M pixel for un-scaled resolution
Multi Format CODEC (MFC) provides encoding and decoding of MPEG-4/H.263/H.264 up to 30fps@SD, and decoding of VC1 video up to 30fps@SD
2D Graphics Acceleration with BitBlt and Rotation
AC-97 audio codec interface and PCM serial audio interface
1/2/4/8 bpp Palletized or 16/24bpp Non-Palletized Color-TFT support up to 1024x1024
I2S, I2C interface support
Dedicated IrDA port for FIR, MIR and SIR
Flexibly configurable GPIOs
1-port USB OTG 2.0 supporting high speed(480Mbps, on-chip transceiver)
1-port USB 1.1 Host supporting full speed(12Mbps, on-chip transceiver)
High Speed-MMC/SD card support
Real time clock, PLL, timer with PWM and watch dog timer
32 channel DMA controller
Support 8X8 key matrix
Advanced power management for mobile applications
Memory Subsystem
- SRAM/ROM/NOR/NAND(SLC/MLC) Interface with x8 or x16 data bus
- Muxed OneNAND Interface with x16 data bus
- SDRAM / Mobile SDRAM Interface with x16 or x32 data bus (133Mbps/pin rate)
- Mobile DDR Interface with x16 or x32 data bus (266Mbps/pin DDR)

[srobot]

Nice idea!

Thoughts - how will you make an app for the iPhone? Is the USB 2.0 or 1.0, and is it powered? If the robot falls will the screen crack?

[billyzelsnack]

You can sign up to their dev program.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action

To run stuff on an actual phone you have to pay $99 to be a member of their portal. Idiotic, but typical Apple greediness.

I went and looked at the dev docs, but didn't see anything. Apple feels that its a good plan to not have search on their non-public dev website so it maybe in there. Can you tell I don't like Apple? haha.

I did find a few people that have got the serial stuff to work, but they were running jailbroken phones and I'm not about to do that. There is some hope though as I've seen people talk about accessing private API's. So your app won't work on the Apple AppStore, but so what.

If it's not possible for this to work the best plan might just be to wait until November for the google android phones to be available. They pretty much are an iPhone clone except for one very important aspect... They are a completely open platform!!

http://code.google.com/android/

Anyway.. If I do get the iPhone working and useful in some way I can pass apps around via Ad Hoc distribution. It's a big pain though since I'd need to be sent device ids to build directly into the app.

[billyzelsnack]

Oh.. They phones are pretty touch. I'd not worry about them cracking. No reason why you can't put in added protection as well.

[srobot]

You can sign up to their dev program.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action

To run stuff on an actual phone you have to pay $99 to be a member of their portal. Idiotic, but typical Apple greediness.

What do you get for the $99?

[JavaRN]

A cheaper solution would probably be buying a (possibly second hand) PDA off e-bay for a very reasonable price, a serial data cable and you can immediately connect to the bioloid robot, and program either in C++ or C# or VB using the compact .net framework. I've never done this but I think it is cheaper and still interesting to try out, the only problem is finding the SDK for the PDA camera. I don't know why but most of the PDA manufacturers don't give the camera SDK for free, you have to buy it! (that is at least true with HP)

[limor]

one thing to consider is the weight of the iphone and/or handheld device.
standard walks may not work with that kind of weight above center-mass.
gumstix has an addon screen.

btw: to all gumstix fans, they are launching a new gumstix based on OMAP which is a monster CPU from TI. (see beagle-board.org). floating processing point anyone ?

[JavaRN]

one thing to consider is the weight of the iphone and/or handheld device.
standard walks may not work with that kind of weight above center-mass.
gumstix has an addon screen.

Yes Limor I agree with you the slightest add-on results in changes in the standard motion, let alone a PDA!, but from my brief experience with the bioloid kit, it seems quite robust.

[joerg.wolf]

Hi JavaRN,

I also thought that a Bioloid can take a PDA. I put on a HP iPAQ with a weight of 164 gramm plus a head with camera of 50 gramm, see http://www.swrtec.de. It was a bit too much for it. When it comes to good balancing, the motors are already on their limits as it is. I can not recommend to put on more than 100 gramm payload onto the robot.
Limor told me last year that a PDA is too much weight, and he was right.
Of course I put it on anyway, because it is a starting-kit to do development, since this year we moved on to a Colibiri board from toradex http://www.toradex.com . It has Windows CE, so by just changing the target platform option from "Windows Mobile" to "Windows CE" the whole code from the PDA works now on the the Colibri board, great.

Joerg

[billyzelsnack]

Only 100 grams!! Geez. That's on the 9.6V battery? When running with the power cord does the CM-5 limit the voltage?

[JavaRN]

Joerg,

Did you try putting the PDA as the "head" of the robot? (like the experiment shown in this forum involving Nokia 770), I was thinking of doing this as soon as I get the camera for my PDA. Right now I am working with CMU CAM as the brains for my Bioloid, I placed it instead of the ax-s1 sensor module and it looks quite big!!! and it is not that light weight (yet lighter than a pda), still the robot could walk (of course after playing around with servo positions).