
Linux robot 92
Will ez robot accessories that connect to the ezb-v4 work on the i/o and other pins of the rasp pi 3/4 and arduino's like other manufacturers accessory kits do or am I wasting my time? I want to know becuase i don't plan on using ezbuilder or ezb-v4. The ez robot accessories are better quality built and give faster explanation of their useability than other accessory kits do and its just faster to buy thought ez robot then any other manufacturers. Plus python is a faster way to program on pi than to run through ezbuilder and ezb, at least how i run through things, instead of using c# like a old pc from the old days. Love ez-robot but just need a faster easier approach to start with.
2) Servos from ezrobot can work on arduino, natively. Although, arduino doesn't have very high resolution for servo positions. And arduino has issues moving more than a few servos at the same time. Raspberry pi can't move servos at all because they don't have PWM. There is a "hat" for a raspbery pi for servos. Have to remember that all pwm servos, whether ezrobot or not, use the same signal for moving. EZRobot servos' are merely stronger and better than all pwm servos. This is because they have over current, stall and heat protection. Also they're super quiet and smooth because the motor oscillation is outside of the human hearing range. Dogs may not like it though
While i don't mind the raspberry pi, i'm not its biggest fan. It is about the same speed as an x86 based computer from 1998. That's about 22 years ago, so i'd rather spend the extra few dollars and use a more capable real computer with x86 enhanced cpu support. The computer i use, that's the same size as the raspberry pi, and runs full windows 10 is the latte panda. The latta panda even has an onboard soundcard, hdmi, and built-in arduino. So it can run ARC without troubles. I have a video review i did on the latte panda which i'll paste below...
See the full tutorial video series I did on the latte panda here: https://synthiam.com/Community/Tutorials/LattePanda-Beginners-Guide-18552/1
The thing about windows is... it gets clogged with programs quite easily. Mostly because they all seem to want to load when windows starts. The thing about linux is, there's not a lot it can do without a lot of custom work. For example, even having our software support linux is a pain in the butt. This is because there's no standard apis for things like speech or audio or webcams, etc.. Everyone implements their own interface to everything, and if they do decide to use an api, it's a different api or different version each time.
Linux may be "free" but supporting it an OS is the most costly venture i've ever embarked on... lessons learned!
Windows provides applications with standard interfaces for speech and audio and webcams, etc... At a small cost to performance (in some cases).
The solution I go with is Windows because it just works. I download windows installer to a USB key for free. I don't even bother paying for windows anymore because all you lose out on is changing the background. A unregistered copy of windows only prevents you from changing the background haha
So download windows, throw it on a usb key. Install it on the latte panda and put ARC on. Off to the races you go...
Great thing is if the computer ever starts acting funny, simply reinstall windows.
I don't install anything other than ARC these days though. I don't even use web browsers on my embedded computer. And if i do, i use the new EDGE because it's actually based on Chrome these days. And it installs much lighter than Chrome. I uninstalled chrome from all my computers and only use Edge. Never thought i'd be saying that but it's the truth
https://www.dfrobot.com/blog-855.html
prices:
https://www.dfrobot.com/category-177.html
https://www.getpaint.net/
ARC is not fully supported on Linux, so maybe you should change your profile name to "Windows Robot 92"
just kidding
We see very very very few installations of ARC on the pi compared to windows. With low cost systems like the latte panda, and what you get compared to the pi, it’s no wonder people don’t use the pi much. ARC for Windows was downloaded 100,000 times in the last year and only a few hundred of those are for raspberry pi.
now I will say there’s a lot of hobbyists and tinkerererers playing with the pi. And they’re happy doing very light weight things with it. So I’m by no means dismissing their time dabbling with the pi.
the reality of the pi specifications speak for themselves... it’s not a computer for serious work and wasnt designed to be. Our goal of ARC is to provide you access to the latest technologies without sacrificing hardware performance limitations. Meaning, I won’t hold back feature development of the ARC software to accommodate slow computers.
also, supporting the pi still means tons of hardware compatibility limitations. Like being able to simply connect a usb device and use it. There’s just no standard framework because no one actually owns any decisions that go into operating system development. And when a group of people finally decide on a way to do it, they change it a month later with a new source branch and call it a new name.
the open source philosophy surrounding the pi has become a playground for programmers to experiment and demonstrate their abilities, rather than develop a stable/standardized product that applications for businesses and consumers can rely on - at least without significant ongoing maintenance efforts. albeit, the work gone into that open source world is remarkable and definitely paves the way to influence stable commercial software on windows. So it really has its place.
It just isn’t a great platform to host commercial applications. But, their community accepts that because it’s the nature of open source. Push push push push changes with new features and let users test. It’s not about the product for them. It’s about the technology. I respect it. But as a business, I don’t know if we can support the lack of standardization.
i look forward to any hack nights with the panda.
the UI is most expensive for computing. It’s very taxing to provide all those gradients and shaders and anti aliasing and transparencies and widget rendering. But once you stop clicking on stuff and let the program run, it’ll rock.
turning off UI enhancements on the latte panda will speed the ui up a lot. Like disabling transparency and such. Also removing all the unneeded programs. A big performance improvement is disabling the virus scanner.
I believe I covered those performance steps in my latte panda tutorial.
To clarify - i don't mean the user interface for the user. I mean the interface of the operating system that you're using when programming. When you program and use the software, you're using a ton of cpu to interact with stuff. Simply having a user interface in ARC for users doesn't use much processor.
That leads me to a question. Is it possible in ARC to create a UI similar to the mobile interface ( like buttons, sliders etc), so a user would not see the ARC windows but rather components like virtual buttons etc?