[chbot] get small

[Helmut Walle]

Just to stay on topic (i.e., the "daft" topic): no need to stock up on 
parts - after all, simulation software and PC hardware performance 
have come a long way, so that the need to have actual electronic 
hardware is diminishing fast. The new paradigm is to pick up some old 
clunker of PC that somebody else has thrown out, and to install some 
electronic circuit simulation software. Then you simply simulate the 
circuit of your choice and use the sound card for analogue inputs and 
outputs. Obviously you can optimise this further by not even 
considering an electronic circuit at all and simply using the PC to 
perform whatever you need. I am sure I must be preaching to the 
converted, being in a robotics group here... there must be heaps of 
robots that use a general-purpose PC for most of the system and 
control functionality. This reminds me of a project several years ago 
to evaluate the usefulness of force-feedback joysticks on wheelchairs, 
where we simply hooked up an off-the shelf gaming force-feedback 
joystick to an old laptop computer that was strapped to the back of 
the chair (running one of the more popular desktop Linux distros). 
While a desktop Linux system is not supposed to be a hard real-time 
system, you can actually get it pretty close by turning of all these 
services that are not required for such applications... it was good 
fun and worked surprisingly well for such a cheap bare-bones approach.

Kind regards,

Helmut.

-- 
+------------------------+
| Helmut Walle           |
| Helmut.Walle at gmail.com |
| +64-3-388 39 54        |
| +64-21-446 137         |
+------------------------+

On Tue, 10 Jun 2014, Mark Atherton wrote:

> http://www.rohm.com/web/global/smallest-electronic-components-in-the-industry
>
> this is getting daft - resistors 300 x 150 microns
>
> if you are into hardware hacking, maybe it's time to fill your pockets with 
> parts you can still see from Deal Extreme.
>
> -mark
>