QuadCore Arduino Tower Kit

Hi,

Found this impressive site with some great Arduino kits, esspecially this quad link up kit [www.liquidware.com]. I know there has been discusion about running out of prcocessing power etc, this could be overkill but also an idea for a way forward?

Dan

That sort of processing power isn't necessarily overkill, but the price most certainly is. If I had 200 quid to spend on a control system, I wouldn't spend it like that at all!

The underlying design appears to be pretty similar to the original dual-arduino setup, using a simple token-passing network between the two uCs and the host PC. That design appears to have been quietly abandoned, in favour of the Sanguino it would appear.

Whilst I'm all in favour of distributed control, peripheral controllers for toolheads need to be *cheap* if they're required in bulk.

Wouldn't a more simple (read cheap) solution be to use the I2C interface for communications and have a single I2C master and several slaves if you were going to do this?

You would save having to have a USB hub and cables, the only downside I can see is the overhead of the Wiring library taking up sketch space... Or am I missing something obvious?

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Wouldn't a more simple (read cheap) solution be to use the I2C interface for communications and have a single I2C master and several slaves if you were going to do this?

Almost certainly. Moreover, I'd be looking at dedicated slave arduino boards which lacked a USB interface entirely, thus saving a penny or two... but then I suppose you'd have to sort out power some other way, and I don't know how much you'd need to draw from the limited power than a single USB connector can supply.

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the only downside I can see is the overhead of the Wiring library taking up sketch space

But then, if you're using multiple controllers, the code on each is going to be comparitively small so there will be more space for libraries and stuff.

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Or am I missing something obvious?

Wouldn't have thought so. You might want to consider running it as a multi-master network rather than master-slave, though. That would let peripheral boards initiate communication with the main controller without the need for a polling loop or separate interrupt lines.

I guess the major benefit with the solution linked above is that it uses standard arduinos, so it may be expensive but at least it is convenient.