Interfacing with sensors on ARM board

[chewbarker]

Hello,
This is my first post so go easy on me.
I'll give a little background first. I have been programming AI for about 4 years, I have a BSc Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. My experience is mostly on the software side in particular evolutionary algorithms, machine learning and advanced vision. Working on robots that other people have built, and written hardware drivers for.

I am currently working as an R&D engineer in a team of two for a company that sees robotics as its diversification strategy.

The problem I have is, up til now I have programmed on Lego NXT, and some ready built robots. Now we have reached the limits of these systems and have been asked to build our own. We bought this single board computer, http://www.glomationinc.com/product_9260.html. The user manual that is available to download only gets me as far as building a toolchain. So I am quite happy developing some C programs in linux, cross compiling these and running them on the board. But I have no idea how to; for instance, plug a light sensor into the board and interface with this to retrieve data for use in the programs.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[jka]

I have another ARM board at home, that I have been playing around with. I think, that what you need is to search for arm and GPIO on google. The GPIO is the General Purpose I/O pins, which you can use to interface sensors and outputs.

This article: http://www.simtec.co.uk/appnotes/AN0014/ describes the theory. You might be able to find more examples out there.

[dunk]

i would recommend getting something like an http://www.arduino.cc/ or http://www.societyofrobots.com/axon/ to get you started with the electronics associated with I/O.
it does not really matter which microcontroller board you start with as long as it has an online user group that has posted lots of easy to read HowTos to get you going.

once you have that part down it will be fairly trivial to make use of the GESBC-9260's "Integrated 4 channel 10 bit A/D converter" and "Integrated 20 digital I/O individual configurable".

you might decide once you have got the hang of your microcontroller that connecting it to your ARM board via USB or serial and letting the microcontroller handle the I/O is the best way to go.


dunk.

[hgordon]

The board you got has an ARM9 - you probably want something more basic for lighting LED's and spinning motors.  A better option might be the Embedded Artists ARM7 boards such as
    http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/education/edu_2103.php
or
    http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/education/edu_2138.php

These guys provide lots of sample code to help you get started.  I really like the ARM7 processor.  Lots of folks like the Arduino or the Axon boards described above, but I only work with 32-bit processors.

[Admin]

i would recommend getting something like an http://www.arduino.cc/ or http://www.societyofrobots.com/axon/ to get you started with the electronics associated with I/O.
it does not really matter which microcontroller board you start with as long as it has an online user group that has posted lots of easy to read HowTos to get you going.

AI stuff won't perform very well on microcontrollers simple because of memory and processing requirements. Something ARM based would better, but still has limits.

I'm not sure what type of AI stuff you are doing, but . . .
What most AI researchers do is have a PC or laptop do the AI, then hook it up to an external microcontroller (like Arduino or my Axon) for hardware interfacing and other low-level stuff.

[chewbarker]

Thank you all for the advice.
My superiors agree that we should take small steps and use something that has a bit more support, like the boards hgordon directed me to.
thanks again