[HH] Rethinking LinuxPC Robot -- the Linux PI Robot

[Greg London]

>As many of you know, I have a robot project.
>http://www.linuxpcrobot.org/
>Over the years I have tried to keep the robot as a viable platform and
>maintain development costs to the sub $500 range.

Well, I would say that the $500 is somewhat arbitrary
in that it doesn't seem to take into account the
time and energy that others would need to assemble
your system and debug it.

If you want a design that raises the material cost a little bit
but *dramatically* drops the labor others need to spend
to take your design and implement it themselves,
then you might consider the zedboard.

http://www.zedboard.org/content/key-features

Zedboard. Dual ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™,
half a gig of DDR3, ethernet, usb, HDMI,
and over a million gates equivaent of FPGA fabric.

You can run linux on the processors
and put all the vision processing hardware you want
in the FPGA fabric.

You'll also have available stuff like CANBUS ports,
so you can use standard motor controllers such as this:

http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro/motor-controllers/217-3367.html

Then you can run the control software in the ARM
on linux, but have a motor controller that will keep
the robot from burning itself out if the software crashes
or gets stuck in a loop or something.