Society of Robots - Robot Forum
Software => Software => Topic started by: Cognisant on July 30, 2011, 08:07:01 AM
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Hello, nice to meet you all and um so forth...
Meh that'll do, I'm just wasting your time aren’t I? ;)
So is it possible, or rather will there be any difficulties, if I wanted to run my robot's AI with the software doing input/output from my computer (for the extra RAM & processing power), which would obviously still be tethered (perhaps wirelessly?) to the microcontroller, or would I just be better off handling the hardware directly as an external device through the USB ports (if so any tips/guides for doing that?) but I think that would more-or-less necessitate having my computer physically in or on the robot which isn't really practical.
Y'know I just want to be really sure I know what I'm doing before I start buying anything.
Also assuming the input/output I'm talking about involves a rather large amount of data, at what point does the USB port through which this data is travelling both ways become a bottleneck? (i.e. I can't get data through any faster)
With past experience using flashdrives I realise it's going to be a lot, but just for the hypothetical "what if" if this did become a problem would the simplest solution just be to use multiple microcontrollers?
Edit: Yeah when I started writting this it was mainly about software... woops :-\
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A robot can be built both ways. I've seen a bunch of robots with little netbooks mounted on them for processing/vision etc. I honestly think it'd be easier to have a microcontroller on the bot, communicate with the computer through whatever (bluetooth maybe), then do processing on the computer.
Then again, depending on what you want to do, it might all be possible with a simple microcontroller. I don't know what you'd be doing that involves so much data. Even vision can be completed on a microcontroller itself. If you need extra STORAGE SPACE, then there are solutions for that too.
You COULD use multiple MCUs, but it's easier just to buy a bigger/faster one in the first place.
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Generally a tether, wired or not, will indeed be limited in the amount of data send-able. It's one of the challenges to figure out how to send only the necessary data (and send it reliably). I don't have any numbers I can throw at you, though.