One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

[Del]

Maybe this would be good for an outdoor laptop-robot.

http://www.laptopgiving.org

Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the
United States and Canada. ...
For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation
and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.
$200 of your donation is tax-deductible ...

[Fredrik Andersson]

Yeah, that isn't a bad idea.

Read about it and i love the idea. I really would like to buy one, if i just hadn't spent all my money on my hexapod ^^

It would work really well as long as you can replace the built in OS without too much hacking.

[frank26080115]

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D201GLY2-Mini-ITX-Motherboard

That only costs about $30 more than a freaking basic stamp 2

Well I guess you need to get a RAM and some sort of storage, but just get some used stuff and it should still cost less that $150.

[fr4ncium]

I'm wish I had the cash for an Asus EEE.  It's close to the size of a DVD case, 7" screen (I think) with 800x480 res.  Has all the other goodies you'd expect in a full size laptop minus an optical drive.  That, and instead of a platter hard drive it has a 4gb solid state drive (flash based hard drive).  It's $400.

But, if you really want a powerful computer that can run an OS, but is small enough to strap to a bot, check out gumstix.  Tiny!

[Admin]

Benefits of the OLPC laptop with respect to robotics:

can take a beating, water/dirt/shock resistant
can view LCD in direct sunlight
ultra cheap
energy efficient
built in wireless

Del, I think you're on to something here . . . someone's bound to do it, the first guy will get the street cred

[Kohanbash]

The OS is based from Linux. If you can get access to a terminal window as root you can probably hack/customize it fairly well.

[Half Shell]

iRobot Create ran by OLPC:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/11/roomba_meets_the_xo1.html

Also, those things are hard to get unless you're willing to pay twice their sale value or a big government contractor. I think it's foolish that they won't sell them for like 50 bucks over their price - I'll gladly pay 250 for that thing considering how damned rugged it is (although it is easy). And yeah, in theory it should be able to control a robot just fine, and should have the processing power to even do basic vision processing!

If someone figures out how to get one without paying 400, someone please let me know!