Hackable Hardware? 12
Cédric Adjih asks: "I wanted to build my own small-and-cool RISC box
(such as an Itsy), or even much smaller, in order to control self-made robots, or other simple homebrew electronic circuits. But the retail-price for individual electronic components is often way too high ($1000 for a RISC evaluation board, $150 for a RISC processor, $1000 for PC/104 with 486 card, ...). Since there is a trend towards more and more powerful and cheap electronic devices (calculators, PDA, agendas, Inet boxes,...), the only rational way is to buy one, and to hack it. But this require internal hardware information, and also a way to interface with circuits (such as via I2C). Does anyone have information about WWW pages describing such hardware or such hacking? An example candidate for the low-end would be the TI-89 (68000 at 10Mhz, 188K ram, 384 K Flash, easy interface with PC, LCD display ; at $150+. Hard to beat that by buying the individual components...), but there might be better, or more powerful...
"
More details... (Score:1)
The microcontrollers quoted by the miscallenous posters are a good solution for electronic/robotic projects, so I'll try this first.
However if a robot gets complex, for instance if a video camera is added, more power is needed. And also, it is cool to have one own "wearable device"/PDA/whatever.
I initially thought that I'd only have to buy a better microcontroller, or processor, but the mass-market hardware looks much cheaper than the sum of the retail prices of the individual components :-(.
So hackable devices look like the next step. Plus imagine adding 128 MB DRAM , 64 MB flash, or a GPS device, or a 20 Gb hard-disk to your small pocket device...
ucsimm (Score:1)
Simpler solution - PROMs (Score:1)
I have used the PIC16C7XX series from Microchip [microchip.com] to do a number of useful things (it has 2 I/0 ports and a A/D converter) it really wouldn't be too hard to get one of these things to control some sort of robotics.
What you do is you write your program with the free software and simulate it. (All software is free along with the specs. and manual for the PIC) After you get it right, you burn it on a chip and boom you have a chip that will do what you programmed it to!
Re:Palm IIIe might be better (Score:1)
I've got a Handspring Visor, and have continually thought of hacking it..
Re:Simpler solution - PROMs (Score:1)
I would seriously recommend thinking about a PIC as the interface chip, wired up to a palm pilot serial port, write the software for the palm an your sorted.
cybiko (Score:2)
Eval kits (Score:2)
Eval kits and other cheap devices have always been my savior. Not the $3K ones that some companies dish out (ick), but in the $100-300 vein.
The uCsimm has already been mentioned, and that is based on the Dragonball (MC68EZ328) just like the Palm. You can get an ARM evaluation board that has a 25MHz ARM implementation from Sharp (LH77790B) for about $150. The URL [arm.com].
Both of these have all sorts of logic already on board, such as serial ports, LCD controllers, timers, yada yada. The uCsimm runs uClinux (again, as mentioned before), and the ARM eval. board can run eCos, a product of Cygnus^H^H^H^H^H^H Red Hat. Both CPUs are supported by gcc, so no having to deal with weird third-party compilers. eCos is a little rough around the edges, but it might be sufficient for what you need.
Advantech [advantech.com] has a fair selection of x86 hardware of all different shapes, sizes, colors, textures, and flavors. Their use in portable applications is questionable at best... (Where did Transmeta go?!?)
There is also the LART [tudelft.nl], which is a StrongARM-based board, but they aren't sold pre-assembled, so it is a DIY job. And unless you have the facilities to do boards with surface-mount components, it would be rather difficult to accomplish solo. I would have one were it not for that one wrinkle.
You can do web searches on things like "embedded processor", "microcontroller", "digital signal processor" and find other eval kits (maybe even reasonably-priced ones!). There are plenty out there.
TI-89 / 92+ (Score:2)
TI-89. Linux. TI-89. Linux.
We are working with Linux 2.0.33 + uClinux [uclinux.org] patch + DragonBall port of uClinux.
No code yet. Help us fix that
MC68HC12 (Score:2)
Weird idea... (Score:2)
http://pages.prodigy.net/fischer-john/
PC/104s aren't that expensive (Score:3)
Try here [emj.com]
Buy the time you get the modules you want it may be in the thousand dollar range, VGA lcds aren't so cheap either. Test kits aren't cheap either but you should be able to find a PC/104 with VGA out and super I/O for under $500 and then it's just a matter of putting it all together. If you go embedded and dump the super I/O you can probably get them for half that but you'll need a test/developers kit to work on it.
To be honest, with the low costs of those machines, I'm surprized there haven't been more hacking efforts. You could easily crank out an MP3 juke with those for you car (all you'd need is the PC/104 and an audio module and a drive) Or little firewall bricks or all sorts of cool things can be done with them cheap.
Palm IIIe might be better (Score:3)
The Palm IIIe, which costs about $150, has a 16MHz Dragonball processor (MC68K derivative) along with 2MB of RAM and a couple of serial ports (one of which is an IrDA port). There is a fair amount of hacking information available on the web for the Palm devices, and you can get a stripped down version of Linux for it.
The only big drawback I can see, for the IIIe specifically, is that it doesn't have any flash memory, so you can't burn your own software into it, as you can with the IIIx or IIIxe. Still, you could always write your software for PalmOS, since there is a fair amount of information and software available for that.
If you are just going to doing robotics projects, however, you may want to look at some of the single chip microcontrollers, like the 683xx, 68HC12 or 68HC16 families from Motorola. Some of those have both RAM and EEPROM built-in, as well as a handfull of usefull peripherals (serial ports, ADC, DAC, etc.) and cost only a few (to a few tens of) dollars each.