Turning the iPod into a robot brain
A few months back I decided to get a Boe-Bot robot from parallax with the Basic Stamp2 micro controller. It’s the first that I’ve ever played with electronics like this before and I was amazed by how easy it is to make good use of the various sensors and actuators that are so ubiquitous here in the 21st century.
After playing around I realized I need something with better ability to sense it’s environment. Photoresistors, ir emitters and detectors, even ultrasonic range finders meet their useful limit rather quickly without some extremely clever ideas. I don’t know if I’m being excessively anthropocentric, but it seems to me that some type of ability to detect light in the visible spectrum with decent resolution, say about that of a web cam, would be the minimum an autonomous robot would need to perform in a unknown environment. I don’t think any of the small commercial microprocessors on the market would work, and one of my eventual goals is to build a autonomous vehicle capable of successfully running a 1/16 — 1/20th scale version of one of the DARPA Grand Challenge courses, which is going to need a fairly powerful processor, at least megabytes of RAM rather than the couple hundred kilobytes that is typical of other micro controllers and all the storage it can get.
Then, while waiting for a load of laundry to finish and listening to my ipod the batteries went dead. I thought to myself, well it’s been a good run, 4 years and the battery only recently started going dead, I wondered what else I could do with this thing. And the idea was born, my 3rd gen ipod has and ARM7 32bit processor, 32 M ram, and a 20 G hard drive!! This is the king of micro controllers, prebuilt with readily available serial ports via the microphone jack that can be very easily hooked to a basic stamp for additional servo control, DC motor control, sensor input, etc. I’ve used the uClinux embedded operating system off and on for the past few years, but never got into hardware hacking and robotics until leaving grad school and had some more free time so I’m not even sure what can be done with the ipod in robotics yet, and my first, shallow google search hasn’t turned up any similar projects, so this will prove to be an exciting and educational experience.