[russell]

I have been thinking about a way that one could reprogram the robot remotely using the provided radio modems. You could even do it in competition I think, though it would be so incredibly slow that there is no way you could download a whole program during one match. Basically, there is a way to use the radio modem to actually send bytes to the RC isnt there? If so you write your own dashboard type interface, which sends the program one byte at a time to the RC, which in turn uses the TTL port to give it to an external programming thingy. Then when the programming thingy has the whole program it goes and downloads it to the RC. I havent looked into what this programing thingy would have to be, but I know that one can get programmers for PIC microcontrollers which you plug into your serial port, and if you were to use the serial output ability of a PIC to drive the programmer, which in turn programmed the RC then you could do it. Like I say it would be incredibly slow. The other way would be to simply have an onboard computer which retrieves the user bytes from the RC then runs a modified ifi loader to download the program. Is it legal to put say an old 386 on our robot, and only use the RC for IO, and do all of the actual processing on the 386? If so how would we do the cost accounting stuff, as I dont think they exactly make them any more?