Flowstone on a HTPC experiment
Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2011 4:30 am
Hi Folks,
I recently tested something this weekend that may be of interest to some using Flowstone. I have been seeing low priced Zotac ID40 brand HTPC's at a local electronics store near me (Fry's Electronics), and was curious to see how well they work with Flowstone.
Here is the Zotac ID40 link:
http://www.zotac.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=531:zotacr-introduces-new-zbox-hd-id40-series&catid=1&Itemid=268
The ID40's specs are pretty nice, so I wanted to set up the PC to work with Flowstone. My intention, is to build more or less a test platform for a bunch of products that I am really excited about. One of the nice things about the Zotac is the fact that it is mainly designed as a media PC - that will really help. Flowstone, should work really well on this PC. It has good sound and video, a built-in 802.11 WIFI, a built in SD card reader, and has a pretty serious dual core Intel, memory, and hard drive. As a programming platform for Flowstone, I found that it was a bit too slow, BUT with an Flowstone executable running, its was pretty darn fast and smooth. Bootup of Windows and the executable in the start-up folder was right at a little over a minute.
I found a nice tank track robot base from a local robot component supplier at http://www.roboticsconnection.com/. This will keep me from spending too much time on the mechanics and more on the controls and software, which is what I'm most interested in. Plus it looks pretty cool.
I plan on using a Propeller C3 board running Hanno's 12blocks IDE. I'm a really big fan of Parallax's 8-core microcontroller, and 12Blocks makes a quick and simple way of using it without having to dig in and learn SPIN (Props native language), and is very useful to actually learn SPIN with. 12Blocks has it's roots in MIT's Scratch language, and was written by one of the top Prop guys in the world. One of the many things I like about 12blocks is the blindingly easy way of utilizing all 8 cores in a prop in parallel, using state machine constructs - which is pretty darn cool, along with so much other stuff. Maybe when the Prop2 comes out, I can find a home for it as well...
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerDevelopmentBoards/tabid/514/CategoryID/73/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/721/Default.aspx
http://12blocks.com/
Finally, I really like Phidgets. I wasn't enthused at first looking at them. coming from my background with the Prop, but you have to hand it to the folks at Phidgets. When it comes to interfacing I/O to Flowstone, the Phidgets are REALLY good. I really like how well designed and built Phidgets and all of the various flavors offered are, and with Flowstone making using them dirt simple to use, makes getting standard I/O into Flowstone really easy. I hope I can make something as nice for my interface to the Prop via 12blocks.
Overall, I want to design a robot test platform that brings together these different hardware and programming environments. Flowstone and Phidgets for the high end OpenCV-style vision capabilities and basic I/O, and the Prop (or Props) running 12 Blocks for fast prototyping of custom, component level I/O.
What I am to build will hopefully look something like this:
1) Tractor base for HTPC, servos, batteries, I/O circuitry etc. (Traxster II)
2) Zotac HTPC with Windows XP sp3 (yes 7 would work to, or Embedded..)
3) Propeller C3 board with 12Blocks for custom I/O (Ultrasonic PING sensors, Gyroscope, inclinometers, etc)
4) Flowstone for HTPC local control, and Flowstone for user GUI control from Netbook or laptop via realVNC.
5) Phidgets for the bulk of basic I/O, including the SBC for expansion of more (Thanks to DSP Robotics for adding that!)
I got the Zotac ID40 working with Flowstone this weekend, and it worked great. I have attached a PDF of my step-by-step procedure for setting up the HTPC how I wanted it, up to the point of testing a couple Flowstone EXE's on it with a couple Phidget modules to look at latency and such over realVNC's window. I was mighty impressed to say the least, so I thought others here may be interested in my setup. I will be posting pictures soon of some of this hardware in action, along with the Flowstone code (of course . Hopefully I won't be too long in doing so with my work load right now. Here is the setup guide:
I recently tested something this weekend that may be of interest to some using Flowstone. I have been seeing low priced Zotac ID40 brand HTPC's at a local electronics store near me (Fry's Electronics), and was curious to see how well they work with Flowstone.
Here is the Zotac ID40 link:
http://www.zotac.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=531:zotacr-introduces-new-zbox-hd-id40-series&catid=1&Itemid=268
The ID40's specs are pretty nice, so I wanted to set up the PC to work with Flowstone. My intention, is to build more or less a test platform for a bunch of products that I am really excited about. One of the nice things about the Zotac is the fact that it is mainly designed as a media PC - that will really help. Flowstone, should work really well on this PC. It has good sound and video, a built-in 802.11 WIFI, a built in SD card reader, and has a pretty serious dual core Intel, memory, and hard drive. As a programming platform for Flowstone, I found that it was a bit too slow, BUT with an Flowstone executable running, its was pretty darn fast and smooth. Bootup of Windows and the executable in the start-up folder was right at a little over a minute.
I found a nice tank track robot base from a local robot component supplier at http://www.roboticsconnection.com/. This will keep me from spending too much time on the mechanics and more on the controls and software, which is what I'm most interested in. Plus it looks pretty cool.
I plan on using a Propeller C3 board running Hanno's 12blocks IDE. I'm a really big fan of Parallax's 8-core microcontroller, and 12Blocks makes a quick and simple way of using it without having to dig in and learn SPIN (Props native language), and is very useful to actually learn SPIN with. 12Blocks has it's roots in MIT's Scratch language, and was written by one of the top Prop guys in the world. One of the many things I like about 12blocks is the blindingly easy way of utilizing all 8 cores in a prop in parallel, using state machine constructs - which is pretty darn cool, along with so much other stuff. Maybe when the Prop2 comes out, I can find a home for it as well...
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerDevelopmentBoards/tabid/514/CategoryID/73/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/721/Default.aspx
http://12blocks.com/
Finally, I really like Phidgets. I wasn't enthused at first looking at them. coming from my background with the Prop, but you have to hand it to the folks at Phidgets. When it comes to interfacing I/O to Flowstone, the Phidgets are REALLY good. I really like how well designed and built Phidgets and all of the various flavors offered are, and with Flowstone making using them dirt simple to use, makes getting standard I/O into Flowstone really easy. I hope I can make something as nice for my interface to the Prop via 12blocks.
Overall, I want to design a robot test platform that brings together these different hardware and programming environments. Flowstone and Phidgets for the high end OpenCV-style vision capabilities and basic I/O, and the Prop (or Props) running 12 Blocks for fast prototyping of custom, component level I/O.
What I am to build will hopefully look something like this:
1) Tractor base for HTPC, servos, batteries, I/O circuitry etc. (Traxster II)
2) Zotac HTPC with Windows XP sp3 (yes 7 would work to, or Embedded..)
3) Propeller C3 board with 12Blocks for custom I/O (Ultrasonic PING sensors, Gyroscope, inclinometers, etc)
4) Flowstone for HTPC local control, and Flowstone for user GUI control from Netbook or laptop via realVNC.
5) Phidgets for the bulk of basic I/O, including the SBC for expansion of more (Thanks to DSP Robotics for adding that!)
I got the Zotac ID40 working with Flowstone this weekend, and it worked great. I have attached a PDF of my step-by-step procedure for setting up the HTPC how I wanted it, up to the point of testing a couple Flowstone EXE's on it with a couple Phidget modules to look at latency and such over realVNC's window. I was mighty impressed to say the least, so I thought others here may be interested in my setup. I will be posting pictures soon of some of this hardware in action, along with the Flowstone code (of course . Hopefully I won't be too long in doing so with my work load right now. Here is the setup guide: