Handy Board FAQ Answers: “whyhb”
Why was the Handy Board designed?
There were several considerations motivating the development of the Handy Board.- More powerful than the Mini
Board. For those not familiar with the Mini Board, it's a
minimalist 6811 design with just the 6811 chip, a pair of motor
drivers, and a lot of sensor/motor headers.
The Mini Board is great for little projects, and it's a wonderful “getting started” board because it's so easy to use, but it just doesn't have much headroom. The maximum of 2048 bytes of memory in the 6811 chip doesn't leave much room for sophisticated programs or friendly (read: interactive) development systems.
- Less complex than the
6.270 Board. The 6.270 Board is
a great board for the next step up in complexity from the Mini Board.
Indeed, the Handy Board borrows heavily from the 6.270 board design;
their feature sets are nearly identical.
But the Handy Board simplifies and re-thinks some of the choices made on the 6.270 to make it a more useful overall package. For example, the Handy Board is quite functional without an expansion board (it has several more analog inputs and the user knob on the main board). The Handy Board fits into a commercial plastic enclosure, and runs from an single, integral rechargeable battery. Finally, the Handy Board is more compact and uses fewer components.
- Designed from readily available components. Those
of us who use Motorola CPUs undoubtedly have a love/hate relationship
with the company. They make great microcontrollers, but just when
you've completed your design you learn that the particular variant of
the 6811 you used won't be available for the next six, eight, or maybe
twelve months.
While the Handy Board is based on a Motorola 6811 product, it uses the readily available 52-pin series of 6811s. These can be found dirt cheap in surplus these days and (hopefully) will not become a supply problem.
- Robotics textbook in the works. I've signed a contract with Benjamin/Cummings (a subsidiary of Addison-Wesley) to create a robotics text for an introductory undergrad engineering design course. The projects in the text will be based on the Handy Board robot controller design.
(Last updated 2000-10-25)