What so good about the CM-900?

[petercohen]

Hi, comparing with other controllers made by Robotis, what is good about the CM-900? Is it better than the CM-730?

[siempre.aprendiendo]

The hardware seems very similar to CM-730

In my opinion:

- price (I think CM-730 does not have AX-12 connector)
- open source (easy to learn, to customize or improve)
- really tiny (easy to use as helper, f.e. debug support)

[limor]

We need to see some cool "kickstarter style" videos of people using the module to do great things. But it is a much needed disruption to the Robotis community on several levels:

1) First of all it is the price.
AFAIK it is cheaper than an average Arduino

2) Arm processor - faster than Atmel and can run 3mbps serial to control the MX, DX, RX series

3) Arduino language support - I participated at a Robotis workshop learning how to use the module and it is a pleasure! you just write arduino code and it works. I wrote something that talked to a servo and interacted with keyboard and sensors in a matter of 20 minutes from opening the box. (*)

4) size - perfect



(*) there are issues in the Arduino concept of lack of concurrency so for example if you are writing 100 chars text onto serial port at 115kbps, the module doesn't do anything else for 1/100 second. there is an async printf implementation in arduino land but not sure it is yet implemented in the new module. but for 99% of interactive robot applications, lack of concurrency is ok as we've seen with millions of Arduinos sold around the world.

[siempre.aprendiendo]

3) Absolutley true; OMG I forget the programming part

I've been playing with the Arduino based Robotis IDE and it's really easy, and potentially (some times there are some fixables problems) even you can use in it standard C/C++.

Direct C/C++ programming using ST-Link hardware is very interesting (I love standard and free software tools), but also more complex, and really cumbersome.

[luisgiii]

Hi I read what limor said about "kickstarter videos" and I have a few using CM-900 hehe

Here is Dynamixel Animator:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KPEStOOvs

in that video you can see how to use it, and if you want.. you can download CM-900 code and Android application to test it.. code can be easily ported to CM-530!

Hope you like it!

Here is the page: http://hellospoon.weebly.com/downloads.html

And I'm also developing one robot named Hello Spoon, he is the first cloud based assistive robot for meal time in the world, using a CM-900 and one Android phone, it will be in Indiegogo soon! You can see a few videos in my youtube page

You can ask any question you want about Dynamixel Animator or Hello Spoon!

Have a nice day