Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Widjets is Running Again, So what’s next?

For the last three months, life’s complications and health concerns have kept me from getting any writing done. My hope was to be able to post at least once a week. I’ll be trying better as time goes forward.

But despite not getting any writing done, progress on the hardware side has gone forward satisfactorily. All of my old Widjets hardware has been moved from boxes on the shelf and is up and running. I’ve installed new versions of LabVIEW and my Verilog EDA tools.

I’ve produced two new boards for the project; a 4-port hub and an 8-port hub as expansions for my WSB serial bus. I was also able to rework an old stepper motor drive card using the new programming format, so I now have a collection of dual H-bridge driver cards.

The original control board hardware I’m working with dates back to 2009 and used Lattice-Semi XP FPGA parts. These are now obsolete and no longer obtainable, so I also updated the control box design targeting a current FPGA part, generated new revised schematics, and even completed the artwork for a new PCB.

Everything was ready to start building upon, but what’s the next direction to go?

Ultimately the purpose of building any further hardware was for it to act as a showcase for what I’ve come to call the Widjets-concept or the wordier Widjets-design-paradigm; that is, a computational architecture based on a system of distributed processing, built up from task-specific preprogrammed modules, connected together by a common serial interface, and programmable in a verbal manner by users not necessarily computer literate.

As a way to showcase this alternate paradigm for robot construction, I thought that reproducing the functionality of the robots used in the NASA Swarmathon competition would be the best way to go about this. But as I went through the details of such a design effort, I realized I was not going to have the financial resources to finish. Further, I can’t see any way, within my financial resources, that I will be able to build any kind of robot, which would be sufficiently complicated in its functionality, to take advantage of this alternate paradigm of distributed processing. At this point, further progress seems to have come to an end; which has forced me to think about what exactly I’m trying to do with this Widjets-concept.

At this point, I must confess, my ultimate goal is to write a science fiction story. And the underlying motivation for exploring the possibility of my proposed alternate robot design paradigm was to prove to myself that it would actually work in practice.

Though I will not be able to finish the actual building of a system of robots based on this concept, I’ve done enough prototype development so far that I am entirely confident that such a system would work in practice. The next blog post will be exploring how this works out.

But for now, it appears that further work on the Widjets hardware has come to its end. I’m not saying that I will never get back to it again – just not until I win the lottery, or something, and have the financial resources to do so

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