cbranje

I'm looking for a USB controller board like the now discontinued Make Controller Board, that is able to interface with MAX and controll motors and take in a few sensor digital and/or analog sensor readings.

good-cheap-controller-board

There's this little thing called Arduino:

Arduino all the way. Dirt cheap, amazing community/support, endless shields/peripherals/extensions and relatively easy to program*.

*you can even use Maxuino and not program a single line of Arduino code.

Arduino is nice indeed, but I'll miss the Make Controller Board (v1, v2 was buggy) which was a real plug-n-play solution. If you need to add an ethernet shield, a servo shield, a motor driver shield on one arduino, the price will rise significantly!

Will the Raspberry Pi make a good interface board?

It's got some GPIO pins. And ethernet, which could be used with a usb wireless dongle to make a wireless connection.

I've a lot of linux programming experience, and would prefer to use a Pi (when I finally get to the front of the queue to buy one) is possible.

Will the Raspberry Pi make a good interface board? 

It's got some GPIO pins. And ethernet, which could be used with a usb wireless dongle to make a wireless connection. 

I've a lot of linux programming experience, and would prefer to use a Pi (when I finally get to the front of the queue to buy one) is possible.


Don't know. It seems more an embedded solution rather than a sensor/controller board. I don't too much about the I/O on it. They have a very long road ahead of them to be as ubiquitous as the arduino though.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MSP430_LaunchPad_(MSP-EXP430G2)

I have one but yet to play with it. Will probably take a bit more to get it talking to Max, but so did the Arduino until Maxuino came along...

that said, Arduino seems to have a much bigger and more Max-friendly user-base. I haven't dug into the TI user groups much though.

Good cheap controller board