Subject:
|
Re: RCX & RIS, a fading glory? - Advanced alternatives: JCX, Embedlets
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.robotics
|
Date:
|
Thu, 30 Jan 2003 21:23:39 GMT
|
Original-From:
|
Bruce Boyes <bboyes@systronix.com{AvoidSpam}>
|
Viewed:
|
1815 times
|
| |
|
|
At 03:56 PM 1/30/2003 -0500, Kyle McDonald wrote:
> Bruce Boyes wrote:
>
> > We plan to sell some kit of JCX sufficient for initial work for about
> > US$500, which is a fraction of competitive robot products.
>
> This is good news! What type of packaging will it be in? What has
> kept me away so far is the idea of the boards being just 'out in
> the open' vs the RCX's nice hard LEGO compatible shell.
One of the "sticky bits" has been designing a manufacturable Lego(tm)
compatible connector. We have prototypes and have yet to order the several
thousand for production.
We don't plan an enclosure per se, at least not now, but will use Lego
tiles glued to the base of the backplane:
http://jcx.systronix.com/backpanel.htm (the tiles aren't shown there, just
the backplane). This will let the backplane plug onto Lego bricks. If it
all sells "like hotcakes" other options become thinkable.
> > Last year an engineer from Lego in Denmark contacted me and we are
> > planning a product swap and further dialog, so, at some level, Lego is
> > aware of and interested in JCX. Perhaps Dacta or whomever will pick up
> > JCX once it becomes "real" and is shipping.
>
> This is interesting news... Are they willing to mold LEGO compatible
> cases for your JCX???
Too soon to know. At the moment I admit JCX is vaporware though the alpha
test units have seen heavy use.
One note: the 100x100 mm backplane is also the legal size for mini-sumo
competition.
As you can see on the U of U web page team photos (if you find the right
photos and have really good eyes) we use 9.6V NiMH R/C model battery packs
which put out the same voltage as the 6 x AA in the RCX. We've also used
12V SLA batteries. So far no lego motors have died.
The Cielguard page has some videos of the soccer bots in action. Further
work on these is planned as we believe it may be the first such autonomous
robots.
Here are some other photo links:
http://lapalma.cs.utah.edu/
If there is interest we could post some of the photos and videos on our
website since some of the student sites are already suffering from end of
semester link rot.
Bruce
------- WWW.SYSTRONIX.COM ----------
Real embedded Java and much more
High speed 8051 systems
+1-801-534-1017 Salt Lake City, USA
|
|
Message is in Reply To:
33 Messages in This Thread:
  
 
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
Active threads in Robotics
|
|
|
|
|
|
