Hi all,

I'm doing some science/engineering/robotics projects with a handful of  
high-school students and for our current project, we're looking for a  
"controller" -- a hardware platform, with OS and programming  
language/environment, so I'm seeking suggestions.

This controller will/should...
- Have a keyboard and video interface (like a PC),
- Talk to stepper motor drivers and servos,
- Have a USB host interface (so we can transfer files using USB flash drives).
- Have a high-school-student friendly programming  
language/environment.  C is probably okay, but Basic or Pascal would  
be less cryptic for them.  Also, I'd prefer a common (well-known)  
language as they can learn something that makes them more marketable.
- Be stable (as bug-free or crash-free as possible).

So far this is pretty much a PC, but to control the steppers & servos  
(PWM), we'd need to use a real-time OS, or use a fake-time (???) OS  
and build an intermediate hardware piece to take parallel/serial/USB  
signals and convert them to real-time signals for the stepper drivers  
and servos.  The latter I can do with a PIC, or use a USB-to-I2C or  
Serial-to-I2C interface and build a PIC-based hardware device to  
convert the I2C signals to stepper and servo signals.  Or perhaps  
there are low-cost USB to stepper devices already available...?

I have a not-currently-in-use Mini-ITX mobo here (with PS, RAM, etc),  
and really want to use that, unless someone can talk me out of it, but  
need to find an O.S. for this.  A decent low-cost real-time Linux O.S.  
would be nice, or a regular Linux distro if I use the hardware  
interfaces for the stepper/servos.  But I don't know what the current  
offerings are for programming languages/environments on that -- any  
decent/simple IDEs?  Windows seems to have many user-friendly  
programming environments, but is not real-time and is less stable.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,
-Neil.





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