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Sun, 19 Aug 2007
In case you were wondering ...

We have moved Surveyor Robotics Journal content to the www.surveyor.com home page in hopes of keeping existing and potential users better informed on product development. In case you haven't visited here lately and are wondering about references to "Blackfin", take a look at some of the earlier news stories such as this to get some background.

In short, we are migrating from the Philips/NXP ARM7 processor to the Analog Devices Blackfin BF537 processor as the core of our robot controllers, and that transition is proceeding at an accelerating pace. There are some good reasons for this migration -
  • the ARM7 runs at 60MHz while the BF537 runs at 500MHz and has dual-ALU's which enable 1000MIPS processing (16x difference)
  • the ARM7 we use has 128kb flash and 64kb data memory, while the BF537 has 4Mb flash (30x) and 32Mb (500x) data memory, providing enough room to comfortably run Linux
  • the ARM7 camera interface is serial at 921kbps, while the BF537 camera interface is parallel with DMA transfer at 177Mbps (175x)
In spite of these performance differences, the power consumption is almost the same for the ARM7 + C328 camera vs BF37 + OV9655 camera, and the cost differences are not substantial. The ARM7 is a very nice processor, but for our application, the performance advantages of the BF537 are compelling.

The transition schedule has not been finalized, but it looks likely that we will have production quantities of the new BF537 processor at the end of September or first weeks of October, and we are now working on the PCB that will interface the BF537 to the SRV-1 motors and other sensors as well as the Zigbee or WiFi radio module. As discussed previously, we will provide a migration path for existing SRV-1 users to the new BF537 controller in the same timeframe of offering new SRV-1's with the BF537.

The new BF537-based controllers will be software-compatible with the ARM7 controllers at the SRV_protocol level, so existing applications such as SRV1Console, Microsoft Robotics Studio, Pyro, Webots, Player, Roborealm, etc, should continue to work without modification. For those who are considering purchase of SRV-1's, we will continue to offer the existing ARM7-based controllers for a while longer, but will likely run out of inventory within 30 days. If you can wait, we would recommend holding out for the new version of the SRV-1. If you have any questions about this, email support@surveyor.com.

Posted Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:25 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...