
Dunning-Kruger
So here is a couple of pictures I just found of the last robot I made before I got my very first EZB3.... Spring of 2013 maybe?
It was an iRobot Create that used a Basic Atom Pro (similar to a basic stamp but on steroids)
- Basic Atom Pro 24
- Lynxmotion botboard version 1
- 5 SFR05 pings
- CP210 wireless data transceiver
- hours of programming.... and what did it do.... wait for it.... LOL
It just roamed around trying not to bump into things.... However it did report stuff like low battery voltage as the send and receive serial was pretty good on the Atom Pro. Actually I was able to read all the Create's sensor data...
Alan
I took a long break after that and then decided to take a look to see what was out a couple of years ago. I found the wall-e video from DJ on you tube and that is all it took. I downloaded ARC and waited for the V4 to come out. I found the community and that is all she wrote. Finally my understanding of computers had some relevance in robotics.
And this was my whole reasoning behind embedding the ezb in a PC... The next evolution of robotics (to me anyway) should be the "Robot PC"... Raspberry Pi is trying to do it, but the software is hard to learn and the PI still sucks at IO... EZ Robot has the software (ARC) and part of the hardware (ezb).... now it seems logical to combine the software and additional hardware (pc and the ezb's IO) for and all in one "Robot PC"... Anyway, just musings...
It is an interesting time for sure for me in robotics. I agree that I came back at the perfect time for me.
So if I bought a hypothetical ezbPC for say $199 (making this up) I would probably be happy with maybe a 2-3 year product up grade cycle?
I like modular approaches to technology. I like things that plug in and are replaceable. Because of this, I think it would be cool to have a computer that accepts an EZ-B as an attached device (maybe plug it into a socket or something). This allows you to replace the v4 with the v5 and so on as long as the socket stays the same.
This is easier said than done. Examples are ISA, E-ISA, PCI and every other variation of bus that computers have gone through. This has been the issue with computers for a long time and I don't see an end to it really. Technology changes so quickly.
I normally opt for the best money can buy when buying technology because my hope is that it will last for a couple of years. With Atom processors I don't think that it is really possible for someone like me to be happy with its performance two years down the road. I have tried to adapt a philosophy of "it runs the app I need it to good enough" but it is against my nature due to work mainly. My job is to find the fastest technology in order to keep up with the demands of the growing company. It is very hard to stay ahead of this curve and once behind it, it gets very expensive to get back ahead of it.
This is all changing with service architectures where the PC isn't where a majority of the work is performed anymore. This is a good thing but costs money to use these. Now that network speeds are good enough both locally and globally, I think this is the direction that things will ultimately end up going. This allows the hardware to stay light on the clients end and allows software updates to improve speed instead of hardware updates. My hope is that this will allow a device to stay viable for 5+ years. The communication channel speed becomes the issue that needs to continuously be improved upon. That too is happening so I think this is a reality.
Where this comes into our world is that what you are saying is possible but expensive. I would love to see it happen. I would love to be able to take something like this and make it last for 5 or so years and be happy with it. The only way that I see that happening though is if there is an upgrade-able device somewhere else that is doing the work with the ever growing amount of data that people want/need to access.