Society of Robots - Robot Forum
General Misc => Misc => Topic started by: Admin on July 05, 2008, 10:57:22 AM
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So it occured to me I have a billion something microcontrollers in my room called the Axon . . .
Whats something neat I can do to take advantage of this opportunity?
Of course maybe a swarm, but I don't have enough servos and wheels to do that . . . nor enough $ to remedy that . . .
Any other ideas?
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The Axon's are the microcontrollers that you designed and made, right? If so, are these ready for sale, or are these previous prototypes?
If they're for sale, I might just very well be interested in getting one as my first controller.
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The Axon is definitely for sale:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/axon
(I ship every Monday)
I have a bunch of old prototypes that I can use and toy around with, which is what I was referring to. The bootloader doesn't work with the old prototypes cause I partially messed up the USB power . . .
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Take a picture of 'em before you run out ? That would be cool, hehe. Since you probably spent all the money on manufacturing them, you can't bathe in money anymore, but hey, axon bath anyone? :P
Anyway, a distributed system would be cool. Connect a bunch of them together (the protocol might be evil) and figure out a way to send tasks in such a manner that they will be shared among them
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Yeah, I definitely agree that something communal would be a fun project, I don't see too many hobbyists doing them.
BTW, The Axon looks pretty awesome. You did an excellent job!
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How about donate them to a highschool and found a new class called "Industrial and Embedded Electronics"?
Other wise, you need to make the real life Ant Colony Optimization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization) solver using something like this (http://www.phenostream.com/products/detail/KIT_01.aspx) but cheaper.
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Well my first idea. Make an Axon shipping system in your garage to automate online orders and plop boxes into a bin for UPS to pickup every day :)
Make a home made HVAC/ home automation system. The axon is over kill but should be powerful enough to receive a command and turn on and off lights.
Or make a massive mobile platform with LOTS of processing power. using some elaborate sensor array to map a room to the mm.
Or make a 3 foot tall humanoid that has really cool dance moves using all the axons to process the algorithm to move the servos.
if your really interested I can come up with about a hundred more crazy ideas :)
I'll post any really cool ones I think up in the next couple of days
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I think the point is to do something only with axons, without any servos
If you have them for free, I'd get some :P (i'll pay delivery, of course).
a really cool thing (albeit, some materials involved) would be a game of life with each cell controlled individually. If you want to scale your system, you simply add more cells. Such a cell can be made with 8 light detectors and 8 leds (or maybe just one led) and one axon. Maybe some other goodies, like a button to switch states?
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I vote for Izua's Idea!
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You could make a software based neural net with them.
Program each one with maybe 100 neuron objects , maybe stage them with neuron layer controllers, and then a master controller. It probably wouldnt have a realistic application but at least when ur mates start bragging about their latest computers you can look all superior and tell them that you have a neural net processor..
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id vote for Pauls idea
a neural network
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Yea actually I was thinking of something more in line with paulstreats idea - something like massive parallel computing using UART's to connect them all up.
Anyone with experience on it? What would be a good problem to compute in parallel? Whats a good way to distribute computation among multiple processors?
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have them run an infinite loop in 5 seconds , the Cray supercomputer can do it , :D ( dumb programmer joke)
actually read this , it is possible to run a kind of infinite loop in finite time ( but not a real infinite loop that is just a label and a goto)
Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true.
Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number.
But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.
EDIT: Some more programmer related jokes. Pretty amusing stuff.....
http://www.workjoke.com/projoke20.htm
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I know this is an really old post, but the one about the undected bug is really funny.
also the one about the process of developing a program. It is soooo true :D
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set up a laser sensor rig so that is u break certain lasers is plays some different music /i've got the.... BEETHOVEN... pa pa pa parazzi.... why don't you come on over vala..... wooooaaaaahhhh your s+++++x is on fiyer/??
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No swarm bots? :-[
I really think a "super computer" type thing would be kinda cool as stated below...
Didn't someone do something similar with a bunch of some other microcontroller?