Subject:
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interfacing PCs with LEGO?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:24:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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916 times
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Disclaimer: I'm not into LEGO robotics yet, so I am quite likely full of
baloney. I hope you'll humor me anyway.
Preamble: I'm thinking ahead to when I might get into LEGO robotics, and the
sorts of projects I'd like to do. I'm a software engineer with a background in
vision and some experience in natural language processing, and I'd like to take
advantage of those. But those require a "real" computer -- and the beefier, the
better, as they're very processor-intensive.
I'm also thinking of the number of degrees of freedom I might like to have in my
robots (four for the hand, one for the elbow, two for the shoulder... and that's
just one arm!), and dividing this by the number of outputs on the RCX. Then
multiply by the cost (and bulk) of an RCX... ouch.
Then I notice that you can buy a complete, plug-and-play Linux box at Walmart
for $300, complete with a decent CPU, hard drive, power supply, etc. -- just add
monitor, plug it in, and turn it on.
All this has led me to ask...
My Question: Can anyone point me to resources about interfacing an ordinary PC
with the LEGO inputs and outputs? Instead of an RCX, I'd like to get the guts
of a cheap PC, stick it in a largish LEGO robot, and have that control
everything (and program this board by plugging in an ethernet cable and simply
SSHing to it). Is this doable, without going through the RCX? What sort of
interface hardware would I need?
Thanks,
- Joe
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Message has 4 Replies:
 | | Re: interfacing PCs with LEGO?
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| (...) Lego Dacta Control Lab has 8 input and 8 output ports. Still not a lot for all the actuators for both arms and legs. But still, it's more than the RCX. (20 years ago, 20-Aug-04, to lugnet.robotics)
| | | Re: interfacing PCs with LEGO?
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| Joe, I have spent time building LEGO robots, and there are a few things that you should know about LEGO while you are doing preliminary planning in your thoughts. Here is a link to comparison information about the LEGO motors. (URL) don't think they (...) (20 years ago, 20-Aug-04, to lugnet.robotics)
| | | Re: interfacing PCs with LEGO?
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| (...) ordinary PC (...) guts (...) simply (...) of (...) You can do the same thing, but much less bulky by using a PIC. The 16F877 for example will cost about 8 dollar, and has 33 I/O pins. Each pin can either be an input, or two of them can control (...) (20 years ago, 20-Aug-04, to lugnet.robotics)
| | | Re: interfacing PCs with LEGO?
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| (...) It's pretty challenging to build such a thing out of Lego. Having all of those degrees of freedom down at the hand tends to push you to solutions where the motors and sensors for those things are a long way out on the arm - that means that (...) (20 years ago, 21-Aug-04, to lugnet.robotics)
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