I’ve been using the Parallax Boe-Bot platform with a
Propeller microprocessor on a Propeller Board of Education. My initial impressions of both the chassis
and electronics are positive:
Chassis
This platform is relatively low cost (bare chassis can be
had for around $80 USD), its compact size and lots of attachment points. Mostly metal, it can take the beating that figuring
out how to detect the edge of a table can dish out! One wish I do have is that it doesn’t have
wheel encoders, so accurate navigation can be a real challenge.
Propulsion comes from two servo motors, so it simplifies the overall electronic complexity. This also has the added benefit of making the robot move at a reasonable speed, so that head on collisions don't inflict any damage (except for my ego - where did my obstacle avoidance design go wrong)!
Propeller and Board
of Education
Multicore, check. SD
card interface, check. Breadboard,
check. The propeller microcontroller and
board of education offer a lot of expansion options, so you won’t quickly run
out room to experiment. Parallax
provides robust documentation for propeller and a free IDE. The IDE supports two languages, Spin a high level language and assembly language for those times when speed matters.
The 64K of onboard RAM may sound like nothing compared to the gigabytes on most computers. For me it has been a huge adjustment. With that little space, things that you rarely had to consider in software development become much more important. For example, not only do programs have to be shorter, the variables in them also occupy that same 64K. It is like asking J R R Martin to write a haiku.
Boe-bot with whiskers
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