So, I am finally starting on a new project after such a long time that I dont even remember.
This is going to be my first recent stab at a robot, other than in class with the kids, since my college senior year project. Similar to that, I plan to assemble the body out of Lego bricks but this time going for a bit more powerful computer as the brain then that time (it was a college project board with minimal CPU and RAM).
In this case it will be a Celeron 400Mhz based board I recovered from an old HP Pavilion 4535 mini-tower.
It currently only has the minimum of 64 MB RAM and the CPU fan is mostly dead (will replace it), but I plan to max out the RAM to a hilarious 256 MB RAM and see if it can boot/run from a large memory stick. I already tested booting from a Puppy Linux Live CD and it loads all the way up, though its super slow with so little RAM. I also want to get a DC-DC picoPSU ATX power supply to drive off of batteries, though that is still in the theoretical phase. Here it is rough setup on the work bench with its guts all over:
It has a wired network card and several open PCI slots, so I may be able to add a Wifi card for remote communications.
I dont think it is fast enough to run Mono or .Net Core, so I may actually have a reason to try out Python, Perl, or something else for its ‘mind’…
Updates to follow…