basic robot brain

[deathwing61]

any sugestons on whether to use a microcontroller or a motherboard when building a robot. tasks are more on the butler bot side of operation.

 

[ramakrishna.s1]

how we can use relays for moving robot

 

[arhi]

any sugestons on whether to use a microcontroller or a motherboard when building a robot. tasks are more on the butler bot side of operation.

The board that will be the "brain" of the bot will be it's motherboard weather you put one or more uC's there and some sensory circuits or if there is CPU + RAM + controllers and expansion slots ...

If we assume that term "motherboard" means "PC motherboard" then:

It really depends on what do you want your bot to do ... if you want your bot to follow the line, answer to simple stimulants ... for e.g. keep going straight on different surfaces, avoid obstacles etc .. then uC is more then enough .. on the other hand, if you need heavy calculation in order to perform very complex tasks autonomously then you need to go with more complex solution then simple uC ... depending on the complexity, you go from single to multiple uC's up to a motherboard ...

on the side of the PC MB controlling the bot, check out the:
http://www.whiteboxrobotics.com/Product/concept.html
http://www.914pcbots.com/community/

 

[leedude]

for the stuff in between you could use a gumstix computer:
https://www.gumstix.com/

 

[Torben]

For something the size of a butler bot, I'd just stick a laptop or mini PC motherboard into the thing.


Torben

 

[arhi]

If you want PC based MB, *ITX boards are great, they have everything, do not use up too much power, run on DC, can boot from CF, no moving parts ... can handle lot of stress ..
the only "issue" is, you need to "hook the mb to your drivers" so your MB will control rest of the robot via usb/parallel/serial port .. (the gumstix is in many cases better for embedded solutions but bit harder to program)

you can check this:
https://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/atoms/

And here are some wiki entries about this ITX standards (smallest first)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-ITX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-ITX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX