Ok, I guess it should not bother me

I have been researching the Android 2 as a robotics platform. Several people have weighed in to say that the only big advantage of Google's Android 2 is that it is essentially free to distribute. However, it has other overhead that has to be overcome. It has to be recompiled per processor, so there is more to sourcing cpus and instruments for it.

I did find in my rolodex that Toradex has a Limestone PDA kit that claims to boot Android 1.6. I have to keep looking. One of my mad scientist ideas is the multiple chips flying closely together to distribute computing projects into manageable chunks. I will keep looking for more. I am not an EE so it is important these solutions be mostly plug and play.

The only "robot" stuff, that I have found before are canned apps from canned boards. I guess I was thinking robot not rc kit. Yeah, I use a lot of rc stuff, but I am not looking to directly control the devices at every turn. They should have increasing levels of autonomy. However, I do have to say that I like that some companies have the same idea that I do. The kit I have found that has the most coverage is the Surveyor SRV-1. It looks interesting enough, but PIC sucks. ;) An interesting couple of "rc toys" on Android movies can be found at robots.net.

Android 2 or windows 7

I saw this and liked it. If anyone has any real reason to choose one over the other without the opensource vs. proprietary hate. I would be interested in hearing it. The thrust is for robotics and control systems, not multi-media or similar applications.

UGV autopilot

Taking the lessons learned from the UAV stuff, I am trying to trim down the UAV pilot to a UGV pilot. The two have different requirements so I am hoping that it can all be put into the mission planner. I have found playing with the UAV autopilot that the event driven solution works well, but is a bit honery.

So I am working on a bus model. Where the individual managers all call into the bus to pass messages, then the bus manages the message delivery. This should decouple the messaging. I was trying to avoid the inevitable hard coding of observers and subjects in the code. This would make the relationships less fixed and hopefully ini-file-able.

I have some other lessons learned about this.

One other question, does anyone have any opinion of Java on Android 2 rather than c#.NET on Windows 7? They would both target netbooks or computer on modules (COM). Let me know if anyone has any practical/constructive opinions of these platforms. info "at" fatmanflying.com