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SB316

Hey! O have been thinking/reading a lot about single board computers and PC controlled robots. And I was wondering just how make and work with SBC controlled robots. Is it possible to just put a laptop onto a base and controll the robot with that?Thanks,

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SB 3:16

Mike Green

Yes, it has been done. You will need some kind of interface hardware. The details depend on the details of the design of the robot and on the specifics of the laptop.

CannibalRobotics

If you can find an older one with a parallel port and an RS232 port then you've got a bit addressable IO port and a serial driver all ready to go. Between those tow, you can control almost anything.

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Martin_H

Many mini-itx motherboards ship with legacy ports like the parallel port and RS-232. The Intel line of this form factor is dirt cheap too. They're also small and light making them ideal for this sort of thing. A DC to DC power supply would let you run one on a battery. With the OS on flash instead of a hard disk the power consumption should be reasonable.

One thing I found out recently is that the VGA port contains an I2C bus and people are using that port to access sensors as well.

SB316

Thanks all of you. I am a beginner in robotics/electronics but I pretty much understand what you mean. Just one thing, it seems to me CannibalRobotics, that all you would need in a computer is the parallel port and that you wouldn't need the RS-232. What would that be used for?

Thanks,

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SB 3:16

Martin_H

SB316 RS-232 is a serial protocol that specifies voltage levels and a form factor. But it is not that different from TTL serial you do with a micro-controller. I've seen some motor controllers accept serial input commands using RS-232. I've also seen voltage shifting chips that convert RS-232 voltage levels to TTL levels. So that legacy port could have its uses.

It might even be possible to interface a mini-itx board to a BS2 board through the serial port. The BS2 could handle all the motors and sensors while the mini-itx does all the deep thinking.

SB316

Thanks Martin_H, also, about the mini-itx board. I just looked up a page on what it is and it looks like it's just the motherboard of a computer. So could it be possible to just take an old laptop and remove the motherboard and use that to control a robot?

Thanks again,

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SB 3:16

Mike Green

Theoretically you could take an old laptop, remove the motherboard, and use that to control a robot. In practice, I wouldn't recommend it, particularly for someone inexperienced in electronics. They're simply not designed to be used that way. Bits and pieces of the device may be scattered about on several boards, some of them necessary for the motherboard to function. This is often done to get it all to fit in the smallest space possible.

Martin_H

SB316, the mini-itx boards are PC class motherboards designed for embedded systems. They and their cousins the nano and pico ITX form factors are significantly smaller than a classic PC motherboard. In general they are designed to use less power than a PC motherboard, but they vary in this area. Often they use laptop components to achieve this.

A laptop motherboard would work and I know someone who hacks old laptops into embedded systems. But as Mike Green pointed out you'll need to know what you are doing.

There are also gumstix which are ARM based SBC's and seem even more power efficient, but they cost an arm and a leg.