Jornada 720 Robot?

Well..as many of you (or none?) of the people here, I read hackaday...just a sweet webpage, love the content. A few days ago I read the thing about the telepresence robot which simply uses an "old school" PII laptop. It runs over the parallel port..and the serial.

Since the Jornada 720 is a sweet PDA I was wondering how hard it would be to wire a DC motor controller to run from the serial cable and compile some form of source code (either C or VB).

I dunno if I'm rambling or talkin' out my as--butt (probably both).

Links:
http://www.potchky.com/pedro/pedro1.htm (the bot from hackaday)

EDIT:
With the new JLime that is comin' soon (couple of days) maybe it would be even simpler to do cause of Linux bein' sweet!

Edited by bobbarker 2005-07-04 11:08 PM

Wow, i wish this could be done with an HPC. i've read about a similar project, but in that case robot's brain was a PPC

That shouldn't be a problem at all. Pocket PCs have long been used as robot controllers. Mostly for high level functions like terrain mapping, object recognition, etc. I'm personally writing a minilathe controller for a beat up MP780 acquired on e-bay.

This thing:

http://www.homier.com/detail.asp?dpt=&cat=&sku=03911

Salvaged the stepper motors off of ancient IBM dot matrix printers. Big, high torque, and just right for the job. Use mosfets for power switching, an Atmel microcontroller for pulse and direction control.

http://www.dontronics.com/dt006.html

And it communicates with the MP780 via serial port.

Still pretty early in the project, but I hope by the end of summer to have the equivalent of a full CNC rig. At worst, selectable rate power feeds on all 3 axes.

The dream is to hit the network share on the workstation, pull down an Autocad DXF, run the GCode converter on it, then have the MP780 control the minilathe make the prototype parts I want for some other project.

Still haven't figured out how to do an automated tool change though...

Anyway, this should be very similar to controlling a mobile robot platform.

Hmmmm...my 'robot' really wouldn't be a robot as far as mappin' stuff and avoiding opjects. It would really just recieve signals from my laptop (via WiFi) and if I get my PDA a camera I can just use MS Portrait to stream the vids back.

I really wanna use my PDA as the 'brains' cause I don't really have the great experience with making larger robots and I've got a few older RC trucks to spare.

I supose I could get off my but and find my old webcam and laptop...

It sounds like all you are looking for is a mobile camera platform. You could do better to just use a wireless pinhole camera. They're pretty cheap nowadays. Mount that on your RC truck, then you're good to go. I see no reason to tie in the remote control with the laptop and have specialized software running it unless you have higher level automation in mind.

True - I do have a pinhole camera from eBay but the capture card on my laptop is external and lugging a TV around (for use in a park?) would be very impractical.

No less, If I used it for 'security' (really just to show off) I've seen em to be controled over the internet so if I'm on vacation I could run it around my house and just run it down the stairs...

But if I could get another J720 (eBay!) and use it to remote control the car and view video it would be a sweet setup..