This is a great looking piece of hardware. Check out all the specs below. This is a very exciting time in robotics to have so many computers of this type coming out. ARM chips are becoming fairly powerful and there are ways to run high level object oriented programming language apps on them. The world of PCs and embedded systems are continuing to merge in many ways. The Qwerk looks like a great development platform for roboticists.
From the Charmed Labs site: “Qwerk is a powerful embedded computer with lots of I/O capabilities specifically for robotics. Qwerk is being offered as the “official” Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) hardware, as well as for general applications in robotics and mechatronics.”
Qwerk Overview
* Powerful robotics solution for university and high school educational and hobbyist markets
* High-performance CPU with an excellent I/O feature-set for robotics and mechatronics applications
* Low-cost
Hardware
* 200 MHz ARM9 RISC processor with MMU and hardware floating point unit
* 32 Mbytes SDRAM, 8 Mbytes flash memory
* Latest generation Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA for custom I/O peripherals
* Linux 2.6 installed
* WiFi wireless networking support
* WebCam video input support
* 4 Amp switching power supply, 90% efficient, 7 to 30 Volt input range
* Rugged aluminum enclosure
* 5.1â€? x 5.8â€? x 1.3″, 11.8 ozs
I/O
* 4 closed-loop 2.0 Amp motor controllers (supports both quadrature encoder and back-EMF “sensorless� feedback)
* 16 RC-servo controllers
* 16 programmable digital I/Os
* 8 12-bit analog inputs
* 2 RS-232 ports
* USB 2.0 host ports for connecting standard USB PC peripherals
* 10/100BT Ethernet port
* Built-in audio amp for playing MP3 and WAV files
Thanks Bob Mottram for the tip!