Sub Ubi

I’m about to order the Gumstix for our CSCS work, and I can’t help but wonder if there are other/better small platforms for our project. It’s hard to say: I can’t find a lot on the net about their use, and the Gumstix Wiki is a nightmare to navigate.

That said, it’s clearly an impressive piece of kit. At the end of the day, I guess you just have to toss in your cash and see what happens.

• Crossbow MICA2
  The MICA2 is a nifty little mote, with great battery, I2C, and wireless communication. Something to look at for the future, I think.
• Botrics Cerebellum
  The Cerebellum is from the makers of the CMUCam, and is a PIC16-based board. While it has more I/O, it only has 8K of space for code, and is a 14-bit machine. A C-compiler would probably come with a cost as well. That said, it’s also something to look at for the future.
• CotsBots
  These little bots are all off-the-shelf and under $200. The project merits more investigation and consideration. We did OK in our own exploration of the cheap-and-quick space, but not cheap-and-quick enough, really. Then again, any small robotics platform is probably going to have it’s ups-and-downs. The CotsBots, however, look cool, and are based on the Crossbow line above.
• Millibots
  This project at CMU looks interesting as well. What cracks me up about them, though, is that they’re like a dump of the Acroname catalog onto a bunch of tiny robot platforms…

That said, I think we need:

1. A Gumstix Connex 200MHz. This is a 200MHz Intel XScale board with 64MB of RAM and 4MB of flash. ($110)
2. A Waysmall STUART board, that gives me two serial ports ($20)
3. A cfstix board, that provides a compact flash adapter for the Gumstix; this way, we can use our WiFi or CF cards (that we bought for the PDAs) with the Gumstix. At least, I hope our cards work with the cfstix. ($25)
4. Two 3′ DB9 to PS2 null modem cables, because we don’t want to futz with moving one cable back-and-forth from a bot to a PC. ($24)

And, niftily enough, I was able to order with PayPal! Which makes it really easy to bury the cost in the UK (£103) instead of in the US ($190). Ah, sometimes a horrible exchange rate is a good thing. But, not usually.

We’ll see how things go. No doubt, we’ll get the Transterpreter up and running on it, and hopefully get the Brainstem slaved to this device.