Wall+Climb+Robot

Hey guys I did some research, and I found that we can use an arduino as a microcontroller. The Arduino Duemilanove is the latest USB arduino board. Here's a picture of it: If you want a detailed description, here's the link: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove

Here's a basic overview: As you can see there is a USB port and a power jack. Either of these connections can power the board, and we can use the USB to interface with a computer. I suppose we could use a 9 volt battery to power the actual robot through the power jack. The digital I/O pins on the top are where we can connect things like motors and sensors with copper wire. To program the arduino, we can use either Wiring, C, or Assembler. Apprently Wiring is specialized for Arduinos and so we will be able to talk to the hardware easily with that language. You can download arduino software used to program the board [|here.]

Since the arduino board is physically fragile and unstable alone, we can get a breadboard to attach to the bottom of it.

I looked around and found the price of the Duemilanove to be around $30-35 dollars, depending on where you're looking. You can find breadboards for around $5 dollars.

I believe that the arduino is a better pick over the pic board because it has more support, is standardized to work with one simple program, and is as open source as you can get. The Wiring programming language will be much much easier to interface with the hardware than C, which is what the pic board runs on. The packaged libraries for Wiring make it easier when it comes to instructing motors or sensors.