Subject:
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Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Mon, 9 Jan 2006 13:04:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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9374 times
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In lugnet.robotics, steve <sjbaker1@airmail.net> wrote:
> consumer devices that cost around the same ballpark as the NXT...
Well, there's a significant cost above and beyond the electronics here. The
NXT *might* be comparable to a PDA, but tossing in 500+ precision-molded little
plastic parts probably drives the cost up considerably (heck, just from buying
sets I *know* it does, where as the plastic case of a PDA or Nintendo is really
cheap).
> and which are likely to be sold in similar quantities,
I really doubt the number of Mindstorms sets sold compares well with the
number of PDAs, Nintendos, Playstations, etc. I think I read somewhere that
annual sales are around 40,000 for the RIS, while given the number of folks in
my town and the prevelance of something like a GameBoy, my town alone must move
something like 10,000+ GameBoys annually (& Elkhart, IN, isn't that big!). I'm
really unclear on how economies of scale come in, but something like a GameBoy
is probably 10x to 100x times more unit sales. As to the other things you
mention, they all require significant amounts of memory to function, while
embedded systems don't usually. I can see why a digital camera or MP3 player
must have a lot of memory, but it's far less clear to me that this is the
important thing for something like the NXT (truth be told, I'm not sure *what*
the priority woukld be for something like the NXT - anyone?).
> ARM == Acorn RISC Machine
> RISC == Reduced Instruction Set Computer
> Acorn == A British company that designed and manufactured the ARM until
> one of the big companies took them over.
Thank you! I sometimes feel lost in the world of acronyms.
> The big thing that makes the ARM popular for embedded systems like
> this one is that the ARM circuitry is fairly compact (because it's
> a RISC machine and therefore runs very SIMPLE instructions very fast).
> This allows system developers such as LEGO to put lots of other circuitry
> onto the same chip and thereby save a ton of money.
OK, that makes sense. So LEGO designed their own chip for this? They didn't
do that for the RCX (I'm not sure why). I guess I hadn't thought of customizing
the chip - I assumed that was wicked expensive, so they were using off-the-shelf
components (like another replier to this thread found) and just customizing at
the circuit board level.
> Expanding the amount of memory (presuming you were prepared to do some
> surgery to the circuit board) might be very easy - or it might be
> impossible. It depends greatly on whether the main CPU chip has enough
> address pins to access more memory.
Drat. It really looks like the first use of our toys is going to be to break
them open to count pins again and read off chip specs. I wish LEGO would release
this stuff to us at some point.
> If you think that's agressive, look at the Nintendo Advance (64Kb,
> released in early 2001) which has grown to the Nintendo DS (4Mb, late
> 2005) which is six doublings in four years!
OK. But I suspect the drive for higher memory there was much more important
than it would be fomr something like the RCX/NXT, wouldn't it?
> I don't think there are Bluetooth flash memory drives or anything
> though.
I've not looked. I do know there are Bluetooth mice and keyboards, and
printers. At least for the printers you have to transmit a reasaonble amount of
information in a semi-timely way, so the data transfer speeds can't be *that*
bad. And I *love* the idea of perhaps building a robot that a bystander could
interat with via their cell phones :-). The question there, as somebody else
mentioned, is if LEGO will allow (or we can add) true Bluetooth capacity or at
least some flexibility, and not just "you get to send this single 8-bit digit".
--
Brian Davis
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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| (...) I keep hearing this (and reading in the official press releases) but having recently shopped for a cell phone, I can tell you that everyone available here (Ontario) that I can find has the bluetooth crippled to it will ONLY talk to bluetooth (...) (19 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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| (...) It depends on the application obviously...but thinking of consumer devices that cost around the same ballpark as the NXT and which are likely to be sold in similar quantities, we have PDA's, handheld games, MP3 players and digital cameras. * (...) (19 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)
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