On Board Computer

[RyanN]

Originally Posted by Phyrxes

Every mini-itx cases I've looked at, even the ones advertised as aluminum, are still listed by their manufacturer as being 2 to 3 pounds for the chassis. What kind of weight allowance are you looking for?

Question: Would it before more effective to get a tablet to handle the processing?

I would be afraid of a tablet for a couple of reasons...

Usually, performance wise, they suck. To keep the costs down, manufacturers cut down the core performance in order to allow the use of the touch screen and the associated hardware and hinges needed.

Even though the costs are lowered by the performance hit, they're still too expensive, and fall way above the $400 price tag for single COTS item [R41]. By building your own PC, you can get every part (and really nice parts might I add) for less than $400 each.

Find a decent performing, sub $400 tablet and I might be interested. My main interest is to keep the platform in Windows 7, and use LabVIEW (FRC version) to keep the learning curve down, while also allowing us to have much more capability.

By having the PC onboard the robot, not only can we offload vision processing, but we can drop off some of our closed loop controls to the PC to improve responsiveness as long as we keep the network threshold below 100Mbits (Robot LAN), which I cannot see being an issue for a LONG time.