Atom comes to android

Back to the article

Hmm yes saw this on another gadgety site... #

Posted Tuesday 6th October 2009 16:25 GMT

Interesting idea, but the jap company seems to have included little to ZERO intelligence from it, there's a vid of it in action and its nowt more than a glorified robot wars RC toy with an odd amount of computing power in it, seemingly dedicated solely to transmitting the webcam signal to another PC and allowing basic remote forward, backwards, side to side motion.

And 2.5 grand! Sod you Japanese company. Lets do some maths - complete Atom systems (including mobo, keyboard, trackpad, LCD screen even) can be had for, maybe £200, lets be cautious and call it £300. couple that with a webcam (£20) , wifi adapter (£20 maybe) quite a few servos (lets say £200 all in considering they're high torque and small), some kind of basic USB based PC to Servo interface (£10 really!) and custom cut metal frame and plasticky bits.

grand total maybe £500, £700 tops, so they're basically charging us about 2 grand on R&D and very basic control software development and all other costs! Meanwhile expecting the 'community' to produce some real intelligence out of the computing power.

Oh how companies rape us simply because they've taken a couple of concepts (I-Sobot and Netbook brains) and bolted them together.

@intel_stewart

Another Atom based Robot #

Posted Wednesday 7th October 2009 07:46 GMT

UofAZ's Matt Bunting Intel Atom Z530 based Hexapod w/PS3 controller: video http://bit.ly/q6erh.

I took a trip to Tucson last weekend and played around with this device, and had a quick tour of the Robotics Lab. The brains for this hexapod is the fit-pc2, a really small fanless Atom based PC. It has a custom Microchip PIC board to drive the servos, that connect to the PC via USB. The PS3 controller connects to the PC via bluetooth. It all runs using Ubuntu

Matt developed all the s/w independently for the reverse kinematics, which someone smarter than me said is non-trivial.

The biggest cost is the servos, the big ones are $199 each, (and a hexapod has ,duh, six legs), plus two more per leg. Not as many in a Vstone system, but not the $5 versions from Hobby World

Next steps, make a battery.. Its still tethered to the wall wart, but the Fit-PC2 runs off 9-15V, according to their forum. And add a camera, there's enough processing power on-board to do recognition and tracking.

Anonymous Coward