Robotics Makeover

This year I am revamping both web development and robotics courses I teach during the summer.

• Web Development
  • Up until now I have been using Plone/Zope/Python for both the course website and teaching web development. Lately though I have been examining Visual Web Developer, ASP.Net, and C#. While I think Plone/Zope has its advantages, clearly ASP.Net is more popular, and its feature set (especially with 3.5) is getting to be pretty comprehensive. What has finally convinced me to migrate is the fact that ASP.Net pages can now be written in IronPython, the .Net implementation of CPython.
  • IIS seems to have its issues, however, so I am looking into reverse proxies that will hide IIS and Plone/Zope behind it.
• Robotics
  • I have been using Parallax BASIC Stamps, Sumobots, and Cypress Semiconductor PSOCs. While the Sumobot is a very nice hobby robot, the computational power of the BASIC Stamp that is at its core leaves a lot to be desired.
  • Microsoft has the Robotics Studio, a .Net platform for robotics work. It has gained sufficient support that I think it is a viable platform on which to teach my course. It requires an interface on the robot that is too much for the Sumobot (although there is sample code for the BOEBot, which is similar). I have been looking at the ARM series of microcontrollers for some time now, and have decided to have a hybrid solution, where a PSOC handles all the low-level sensor/motor interfaces, and the new ARM Cortex M3 handles the AI/machine learning as well as the interface to the Robotics Studio.
  • I purchased the Olimex STM32-P103 prototyping board, based on the ST STM32F103RBT6 Cortex 32-bit microcontroller. It has the following features, from the Olimex website.
  • ARM 32 bit CORTEX M3â„¢ with 128K Bytes Program Flash, 20K Bytes RAM, USB, CAN, x2 I2C, x2 ADC 12 bit, x3 UART, x2 SPI, x3 TIMERS, up to 72Mhz operation.
  • I think I have gotten spoiled by the rich set of peripherals available on the PSOC, because while the set of peripherals the Cortex has is reasonable, by itself it will not be able to manage all the sensors and hardware of a robot.
  • I am thinking of using a new chassis for the robots, I need to do a full engineering preliminary design before I can commit to that course of action.

After much reading and searching I have finally managed to burn, run and debug a sample LED blinking program on the STM32-P103. The beauty of open source development tools is obviously the cost and the frequent updates, but the disadvantage is the lack of good documentation or manual. I have been able to piece together bits and pieces through a lot of trial and error, and will be posting everything I have learned so far soon, with sample code.