Robostix

Robostix is an expansion board for the gumstix motherboard provided by the manufacturer of Gumstix. Robostix has an AVR ATmega128 microcontroller unit with analogue to digital conversion facility, capable of producing a 10-bit resolution digital output. It has 8 ADC (Analogue to Digital Converter) channels making it over qualified for our requirements, as we are only planning to connect four sensors. The Robostix board also has a large number of IO pins which can be used to control various external devices connected to it. For example LEDs can be connected to the IO pins in order to indicate various states of the device in real time or to control the On/Off state of sensors and other such uses. Robostix runs code as a standalone board however it can connect to the gumstix through one of its serial ports which enables easy cross-application communication which can give the gumstix control over its behaviour and of those sensors or other external devices connected to it. Hence the flexibility of the application is not limited in any form as result of the Robostix executing code in its own environment.

Figure 3.4 shows the Robostix expansion board.

Figure 3.4: Robostix expansion board.