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COMPUTER HARDWARE 77
Speeding Up Engineering
Using computers within the robot obviates the need for full and detailed planning.
Now I’ve done it! Of all people, I advocate planning as a time-saving effort that is
well worth engaging in. The truth is, some projects are too difficult to plan all the way
through in great detail. But if we can be reliably assured at the start that our computer
will give us the flexibility and horsepower we need for unforeseen circumstances, we
can proceed without full planning.
Putting a computer in the system brings the following benefits to the engineering
schedule:
The overall engineering effort can be partitioned. If we have more than one per-
son working on the robot, the work can be divided and executed in parallel. One
person can concentrate on the hardware while another person starts on the soft-
ware. The hardware does not have to be finished before the software can start. The
programmer can work on a board similar to the one in the robot.
Changes in the specification of the robot can be made along the way with some
confidence that the new requirements can be accommodated in just the software.
It’s much easier to change the software than to change a hardware design.
The design can be changed as needed for future maintenance even after the robot
is completed.

On the lighter side, one way to speed up engineering is to make a contest out of it.
The following URLs show just how fast things can get done if we would just apply our-
selves with diligence to an engineering problem:
http://kennedyp.iccom.com/text/Playing_with_fire.txt
http://home.att.net/~purduejacksonville/grill.html

Computer Architecture

Computers were designed to perform arithmetic calculations rapidly in a repeatable
manner. There are many different ways a computer can be constructed and this section
covers many of the different architectures that exist.

TYPES OF COMPUTERS
Let’s assume, for the moment, that we’ve decided to put a computer into the robot.
Although many general-purpose computers are available, it makes sense to take a look