Subject:
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RCX: JCX Super replacement, HandyCricket, New Technologies
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 7 Feb 2003 16:56:34 GMT
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Original-From:
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Bruce Boyes <bboyes@uswest.IHATESPAMnet>
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Viewed:
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941 times
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At 10:11 PM 2/6/2003 -0500, Andy Gombos wrote:
> I haven't really looked into HandyBoard, since I found it to complicated
> compared to the RCX. 20 year old tech works fine on the Space Shuttle and
> other NASA projects BTW.
It's a fine board (and my 286 PC/AT was wonderful in its day too). I have
tremendous respect for Fred Martin and have had the pleasure of meeting him
briefly. He actually is no longer focused on the Handy Board but is working
with something even smaller - the HandyCricket:
http://handyboard.com/cricket/ So Fred is going the opposite direction from us.
JCX has enough resources to easily support some other protocols such as the
Cricket IR - imagine a swarm of JCX Lego bots and Crickets working
together. Why not?
All the space shuttles have had refits of their avionics and controls about
every five years, so they actually are not using 20 year old technology but
are very current.
My point was the HandyBoard has no more processing power or memory than the
RCX, and that lack of power and expansion was the original complaint.
You will never have Bluetooth or real ethernet, IrDA to a Palm, etc on an 8
bit micro with 32 KBytes. Such limited systems just don't have the
resources to support open standards and attract much of an open source
following. Such limited systems will always be constrained to clever
compromises which only go part way to delivering what everyone really
wants. It's partly a constraint of price/performance, but in general you
can deliver better value using newer, more efficient technology (the major
part of JCX's secret). For example the 32-bit CPU JStamp consumes less
power than the 8-bit high end BASIC/Javelin Stamp, and JStamp has up to 80
times the memory, plus much more processing power. JStamp only costs about
50% more:
http://jstik.systronix.com/compare.htm
I'm not saying all this just to trumpet our own products but to point out
that technology really has advanced significantly in the last 5-10 years
and the benefits are real. It's not just marketing hype. I'm looking at a
new Motorola GSM cell phone with Java, 1 MByte of memory, always on data
connection and a decent color screen, and it can run on its battery for
many hours. This was impossible even three years ago.
So whatever your choice take a good look at the new 3.3V low power 32 bit
controllers out there. You get 100-1000X more capability at 2-5X the price
of 20-year old chips. It's Moore's law in action.
If you're thinking of some architecture which will last for 5-10 years from
now, you really must consider what looks "bleeding edge" today. It will
likely be just acceptable by the time any product gets widely adopted.
> JCX seems nice, but $500 for a replacement is getting a bit steep for the
> market, IMO. Ideally, a replacement for the RCX would not involve a huge up
> front investment of cash to get started - that's why a modular system that
> lets you add components would be ideal. Using up the 32K RAM you have? Get
> another 32K module, add it in, and start using it. With a more enclosed and
> sealed solution, you are limited in upgrade path.
The HandyBoard is $300 and has no Lego(tm) compatible I/O. The Cricket BTW
is $99.
We think for a large number of people, the power of (more than) 10 RCXs
for $500 will seem like a bargain. We know we can't please everyone, and
for them the RCX will still be around. There will always be less expensive,
(and less capable) systems, and that's OK. Everything has its place.
JCX is far from sealed. It supports more open standards and already has
more open source projects going than anything even remotely similar. This
was very important to us - continuing the open spirit of the current Lego
community. JCX is also incredibly modular.
We plan to eventually offer prototyping kits to make it easy to add your
own sensors, motors, whatever, and have all the low level interface
hardware and Lego(tm) compatible connectors already done for you. We
already have a simple JCX /JSimm prototype board shipping:
http://jsimm.systronix.com/jsimm_proto.htm
Many of the programming and development tools are open source and
available for free, and they are incredibly good, for example
http://www.eclipse.org/
The huge win here is using Java which has an enormous open source
community. Some of my students used the NIH ImageJ and other open source
Java code in their projects and got an incredible amount of work done in
less than one semester.
http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs4710/teams.html
They could not have done this using C, assy, and custom/proprietary
libraries and tools.
Still there is demand for C and we may build a JCX controller board which
supports that. It would probably be based on the Dallas TINI400 TStik:
http://www.systronix.com/tinistik/tstik72nb_data.html which does not have
the performance of the JStamp and JStik controllers, but it is less
expensive and does have 10/100 ethernet built in, along with plenty of memory.
OK, sorry, enough yammering about "coming products", I need to get back to
work getting them ready to move out the door.
Bruce
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: RCX & RIS, a fading glory? - replacement for RCX
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| (...) Please, no. HandyBoard is fine, but it is 20+ year old technology. If you can all hang in there another two months the answer will be JCX: (URL) KBytes SRAM (this can be used just for heap - working data space) 512 KBytes to 2048 KBytes Flash (...) (22 years ago, 7-Feb-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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