Robots...

After last Christmas, my Dad gave me a copy of the Summer 2007 edition of Robot Magazine, a once quarterly publication that is about all forms of Robotics, though mostly aimed at hobbyists.

I had a lot of fun reading it, as I'm one of those people who like that sort of thing, and there was also an article on the two original Mars rovers (apparently they were used as testbeds for the latest Mars rover, and so had their software updated to assist in navigation and in what pictures they sent back).

Now, my Dad found it in another location (and it turns out that they've upped it to six times a year), so I've been rather busy reading through this one...

At first I was a bit disappointed with the second one, until I started reading the articles for their content and not for what I thought was interesting.
(I have a habit of doing that sometimes, and so miss important and sometimes very interesting information)

One piece of interesting information is about a microcontroller that has eight processing cores on it (having used a LEGO Mindstorms RCX for a couple of years makes me really appreciate multi-tasking robot brains).
(it's by Parallax Inc., the makers of the BasicSTAMP etc., and it's called the "Propeller". The demo board you can get is good enough to emulate a terminal, right down to the PS/2 keyboard and mouse inputs, and VGA output!)

So now there's two microcontrollers I'm interested in getting (the Arduino is the other one).

Now I just need the money for either of them and some way to adapt them to LEGO...