AusRobotics

OK, I've bitten the bullet and started playing with an avr8 board!

I bought an 8MHz Pololul "Orangutan" (and programmer) some time back, and until now havn't had a decent project to plug it into. But monitoring a few PWM sensors, doing a small amount of filtering and plugging into a USB port may be it.

But with "only"  1K of ram, it may be pushed to be much more than a gateway between one of the avr32 boards and the sensors involved. But it does have 16k of flash, so the s/w can be pretty 'sfisticated.

The basic INS filter I was playing with this past couple wks is only about 8K of 6800 code (i.e. gcc -Os/-O2).

For those interested in such things, the approx 2" sq  board also has 8 10-bit a/d,  a 2-line LCD, a few buttons, a LED, a knob on ad7, a buzzer, and 2 1A motor channels.

It seems like Pololu are moving in the direction of larger robots, so the price has dropped a bit since I bought mine. I noticed a package with an "original Orangutan" plus its controller is now under 70 usd for unit qty.