With help from all of you

What matters to me, and the direction ezrobot takes, is not financially driven. I care about adoption and usability, which does result in sales - but as you know from me, all proceeds get reimbursed back into EZ-Robot for additional growth. If I did this for the money, I would have paid myself the millions of dollars of revenue rather than being the lowest paid employee at ezrobot

I'm in this to change the world - not benefit myself. The reward I'm looking for is a page in the history books... Guess I want to live for ever and this is my way to do it!

@DJ,

Your speach is full of motivation and is a reflection of you being the force behind EZR, so that's why i said you re biased.

saying something is simple can be viewed as negative or positive in my arguments always means good

@Rich, if the things get complicated is not fun I tried the RPI linux, mono and the EZSDK for mono, i noticed there are no Video Capture, no Speech, no vision processing, no good bits ? wait this is not where EZB is good, making your life simple. I moved to Windows 10 Iot, to discover that is unstable, very limited, so more pain i give up, so you have two options return to windows or change the tools.

@Richard R, the script language has few instructions, is tweaked to the user needs, simple pragmatic, no complex concepts, so is a very good to start, once you get in you can a lot of cool stuff. Don't forget most things we do in EZB are action oriented, you don't need to develop rocket science code to control the robot, the EZB provides the common base for you to excel. When you reach a limit you need to get out and develop plugins, but to develop plugins, you need other kind of skills, and you are moving away from EZB.

we are talking different mindsets. I have 3 kids (less than 9) , and understanding their mindset and finding the right tools to help them grow keeping them hooked to robotics/electronics is my main motivation.

One of the girls she is a DIY, her main interest are wearables, tiny arduinos, leds and, micro servos, sensors etc is the way to go, she is not ready for the Arduino IDE neither the C Language, eventually she will get there.. right now google, dad and copy paste code works, so an Arduino fits.

The Boy likes to build, he likes to develop his creations, find new mechanics, so a LM = Lego Mindstorms is a good fit, costing a little less than one of my EZ Kits brings more stuff (mechanics parts) and he wants to build before "coding", is very young so EZB is still a good complement, due to begin exposed in school to LM, eventually he will explore the LM tools.

The other Girl, she does not want to spend a lot of time learning the inner concepts, she wants fast results, and the wow effects, show & tell... she thinks a programmer should be like those scifi movies where the guy use the hands and move projected blocks, bright lights and sounds, rotating hands like minority report, she got frustrated when she see more than 10 lines of codes... So for her the EZB is the best tool, and she will slow starting coding again (thanks to the EZB basic script nature).

So 3 kids, 3 different mindsets, 3 different tools, and everyone will say they use the best tools.

Cheers,

Interesting responses and conversation, to say the least! We are wandering from the original goal of this thread a bit, but we are still coming up with ideas.

@ptp your examples with your children bring up a good point on where ez-robot sits on the scale, and who ez-robot is aiming towards, and that arduino is a good learning area.

@Richard and @DJ The middle ground reference is very useful.

I'm curious about how any Arduino user will be accomplishing speech recognition, various vision object tracking, joysticks, wiimotes, and iOS/Android development - all in under 10 minutes without touching a keyboard? Why would someone want to build a robot with Arduino to have less features...

Do not confuse the simplicity of EZ-Robot with not being scalable or powerful. There are a number of high profile customers of EZ-Robot, such as NASA, Google, MIT and Stanford. Why? Because you can prototype anything in an afternoon rather than months. EZ-Robot is a development solution platform, not a component.

If your comparison is to state that a child will start with EZ-Robot and move to Arduino later, I have already stated reason why that doesn't make sense. So, you learn to drive a car and the next step is to make your own car from scratch? No, you learn how to drive the car better

It's funny because here I am, spending my weekly research to see what is happening in the robot world - what's funny? The fact EZ-Robots made by 12 year-old's are doing equivalent or more than multi-million dollar research facilities. Anyone would have to be blind or ignorant to not recognize the difference between a walking, talking, seeing and listening EZ-Robot and an Arduino robot

Agreed! Alright, I'm starting up the press line to start making some videos!

Maybe it comes down to "how" you want to get to where you are going. The easy way or the hard way. Here's an excerpt from another forum;

"Controlling the InMoov Hand with a sensor glove. We used 4.5? resistive strips in a voltage divider network connected to a dedicated 10-bit ADC that sends data to a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi packages the data and sends it via Wi-Fi to a second Raspberry Pi that turns the 10-bit values into duty cycle commands to the servos.

We were able to wirelessly control the hand from over 50 feet away without any lag whatsoever, and it works so fast! We only used a linear algorithm to translate from ADC value to duty cycle; so there is loads of room for improvement in modeling the finger movement! " https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10208014012732681

This was accomplished by some Electrical Engineering students at UMass. Not to take away from what they did but I did this in my shop this morning, just for giggles. It took me 30 mins. Of course I was using EZ Robot stuff.

That's a funny example because it still doesn't come close to competing with the EZ-B. And here's why, they said "no lag". Well, that's incorrect.

The raspberry pi and linux has a high overhead of an entire OS which buffers tcp socket data and prioritizes i/o. Additionally, there are socket flags which need to be tweaked based on the expected delay times and priority of communication. This is because TCP/IP was developed for both real-time and general network use. Now, real-time communication over TCP/IP is actually quite a forgotten art and the socket flags have been pushed pretty far back in today's documentation.

So, while they can say "there's no lag" - the fact is, they're only moving a few servos over a single tcp socket connection as a single process. What they are not doing is streaming real-time video, streaming audio, moving 24 servos, collecting ADC, setting digital ports, ramping PWM between positions at user-defined speeds, buffering 3 UARTs, and hosting a web server. ALL in real-time! With complete framework, graphic interface, 3d designers, programming environment, AND vision tracking capabilities.

In short, if they say no lag - I know for fact EZ-Robot is magnitudes less lag than their configuration, meanwhile we're still doing more. So, if they have no lag - does that mean EZ-Robot has negative lag? haha

Now, when someone tells me they're doing what EZ-Robot does with a raspberry pi, or arduino - then guess EZ-Robot finally has some real competition. Although it's impossible to do that with Arduino because it's not an efficient or complete development platform

So, Bob does that for fun in a few minutes - meanwhile a bunch of students spent half the year doing 1/100th of what EZ-Robot can do.. All they needed to do was spend $70 on an EZ-B.

There's a reason no one else is doing what EZ-Robot does - it's because we use the forgotten art of assembler and low level programming. Not depending on an existing OS that was designed for web browsing - our community (you) defined the requirements, and we worked backward from the requirements to design a platform that met those requirements. You all asked for the features EZ-Robot provides real-time, and we did it - no one else has

@bhouston I plan on quote you on that in my video if that is okay.

@DJ you strive to deliver don't you!