One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all

Fred Hawkins

And·in the darkness bind them

I was reading the Methods and Cogs·lead paragraph and lapsed into·a reverie regarding little methods duking it out. Each participant provides a method and hardware.

• You five get a cog, I get a cog, the host gets a cog (or two).
• You five each get 4 pins, I get 4 pins.
• We have a competition.
• Best cog wins.
• The host figures it out. ·

So I thinking, what would that do? We'd end up frying chips to win, using Cogstops and it would end up like tic-tac-toe with a single killer strategy.

Better:·Collaboration where with 4 pins each,·a group of six (maximum) cogs do something intrinsically interesting. ·I like this problem: move 10 sugar cubes from one side of the pcboard to the other.

What's needed? A standardized physical board (I urge the Prop Proto Board #32212*)·with six 8-pin sockets to support some degree of force, each getting 4 pins of i/o, regulated vdd and ground.

How about these socket specs:

1. i/o pin n
2. i/o pin n+1
3. i/o pin n+2
4. i/o pin n+3
5. regulated 3.6v
6. ground
7. heavy category: regulated 5v
8. ?

Two categories of collaboration: Minimized where complete system power is a single 9volt battery. Heavy can use walwarts and the 5volt feed.

Collaborators provide a plugboard and cog code that embodies their part of the solution. Question: Standardized plugboards (say, 8 by 24 holes)?
Or·is a maximum·physical size·specification good enough? (That would allow for the most creativity and variation.)
·
Host launches collaborators' code with the base pin number and hub address of·some sort of interchange block of which the first long is for the Host.
This part ought to be standardized too. Host is responsible for visual display but a minimal white LED is sufficient.

What do you think? Could this be fun?

Fred

* or uController's Spin Studio which conveniently puts four·20-pin·male·plugs on the edges of that board. 8 i/o pins per plug plus vdd,vss and 5v. Slightly different game perhaps better.

Post Edited (Fred Hawkins) : 9/15/2007 5:15:53 PM GMT

deSilva

Fred, for some days now I have got the impression, that you have been missing the required sobriety for our stern occupation here... Can that be?

And how can you garantee a member sticks to its 4 pins?

Post Edited (deSilva) : 9/15/2007 12:25:31 PM GMT

Fred Hawkins

You can't, but in a collaborative project you would expect good behavior or accomodation or both. And probably you should expect that some nice implementations would use 2 or 3 cog/pin sets.

Interesting reading: google 'swarm-bots'