Texas Instruments acquires Luminary Micro

[Andrew Schuetze]

An additional interest is to see if Luminary Micro will have an effect on the BEST program. BEST just developed their own programmable robot controller which was implemented system wide in the fall of 2008 and was piloted in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 2007. I believe that it uses the MSP430... which is a TI product. No autonomous yet in BEST,.. programming options limited to the free/open source development environment and no real sensors other than limit switches. Also still limited to a 4 channel RC for the OI.

Cool factor of BEST is to see the McGiver bots made from all wood and plastic

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schuetze

An additional interest is to see if Luminary Micro will have an effect on the BEST program. BEST just developed their own programmable robot controller which was implemented system wide in the fall of 2008 and was piloted in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 2007. I believe that it uses the MSP430... which is a TI product. No autonomous yet in BEST,.. programming options limited to the free/open source development environment and no real sensors other than limit switches. Also still limited to a 4 channel RC for the OI.

Cool factor of BEST is to see the McGiver bots made from all wood and plastic

Wasn't BEST running the competition that ran off of Game Boy Advances?

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

Wasn't BEST running the competition that ran off of Game Boy Advances?

I think you mean Botball, which ran of the Charmed Labs Xport Botball Controller. The XBC which used a FPGA plugged into the gameboy game slot. The gameboy provided the CPU power and screen, while the FPGA did fast blob tracking and dealt with all the hardware. Botball moved onto a modified version of the chumby running Linux this year. Hopefully I'm remembering my facts right, but I distinctly remember the reason they moved on to the chumby is because they pretty much ran the used gameboy market out of gameboys...