Advice on a project - activating movie sequences with sensors

[tmshaw]

Hello!

First this is what I want to accomplish:
I would like to build a device (eventually a robot) that has various sensors (IR, motion, touch, etc.) that when tripped, trigger an appropriate short video to play on an LCD screen, most likely a PDA, just because that's what's available to me at the moment. I like the idea of the PDA too because it can aready play video, has large memory storage for the videos, and it has its' own rechargable battery.

So, to run the sensors and control robot behaviour, I was thinking the Propellor was a good choice? Does the Prop seem appropriate for this sort of thing? I wonder if, instead of trying to write a program for PocketPC to interface with Prop and to run the videos, it would be easier to write a program for Propellor and add some hardware SD memory card storage and a simple LCD screen.

Anyone have any ideas on the subject or advice?

Thanks.

[Timothy D. Swieter]

What do you mean by videos? If you mean hi-res clips of sorts, not polygon generated looking demos, then you will certainly need the PDA to play the videos. There are several architectures you could pursue this with.

1. The Propeller is the master of all. In this case the sensors, motors, etc are all directly controlled by the Propeller. The Propeller decides where the robot goes and what it does. The PDA receives a trigger (a serial string?) of what video to play.

2. The Propeller is s slave to the PDA, which is the master. The program on the Propeller is such that it controls and manages the motors and sensors on the robot - it does the heavy lifting of sorts in processing, but it passes that high level information to the PDA. The PDA gets data from the Propeller and then issues new commands to the Propeller.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com (http://www.brilldea.com) - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC, eProto for SunSPOT, BitScope
www.tdswieter.com (http://www.tdswieter.com)