Using a computer to control the pic

[mikesown]

I am currently in the process of writing a java application to communicate with the pic, and basically tell it what values to change the pwm's to etc etc. I was just wondering if anyone had tried something similar where the PIC is a dummy computer that just passes through commands it recieves through a serial port to the pwms.

Thanks
Mike

[Alan Anderson]

The FRC default code does essentially that: joystick values and switch state inputs are copied directly to PWM and relay control outputs. What you're talking about is no different in principle.

[Greg Marra]

The Internet just ate my post. Let me retype it...

Last year, 177 had a system where we had a wireless serial link using SMiRF radios and Kevin Watson's serial code. This let us interact with the robot and send it commands to change various PWMs or anything else on the robot on the fly. We just had some code that looked at what we were sending it via serial and changed things correspondingly.

Basically, you want to do the same thing, only wired instead of wirelessly. I would recommend looking at Kevin Watson's serial code as a starting point.

[Rickertsen2]

We had a nifty program called ARCAMS that we wrote last year for diagnostics and configuring our autonomous. It had the capability to do this, but we only used it once or twice for diagnostics. I have often contemplated doing all processing on either a palm pilot or cruddy laptop attached to the robot itself. Let me know how this goes. To me, it seems largely unnecessary though. I have found the computing power of the FRC to be plenty adequite. now if we had a larger sensors budget or more complex autonomous tasks, things might be different.

[Ryan M.]

Linux robots is a fairly similar idea. (Maybe a bit more ambitious.)

[Gdeaver]

Allot of robot projects have used a portable computing device as the brains and a microcontroller to handle the low level hardware interface. A Palm, pocket PC, PSP and others are mass produced and provide a fast powerful computing platform for a reasonable cost. I believe the bot ball competition has gone this way with a dual screen gaming platform. I would expect some high level robotics IDE's to start appearing soon for portable devices.

[ghansel]

Originally Posted by Ryan M.

Linux robots is a fairly similar idea. (Maybe a bit more ambitious.)

It's about the same actually. Nearly identical in in conception, purpose, and intent, but quite different in execution.

George