Re: [Balloon] Re: Next Balloon

> Not really. there's a natural size for any board. Balloon 2.0x was
> rather smaller than its natural size, and was made trickier
> because of that. Making boards bigger reduces the possible
> number of uses, makes EMC compliance harder, since the
> antennas get longer and it's harder to stick a tin can over it, all
> sorts of hassles. I suspect that Balloon3 will fit comfortably onto a
> Balloon2 footprint, while staying cheap.

Okay that sounds good. So would it be feasible to do the Balloon3 in, say,
a 4 layer board? Obviously that would make it a good deal cheaper to
manufacture.


> Having spent half of today reading data, it does look like a very
> fine candidate. (and it's got 4 PWM channels, which I know you
> guys were hankering after, and the interface to FPGAs looks
> exceptionally convenient)

Yes that would be great. Although if we start using the existing 2.05
boards initially, we may have to come up with our PWM add-on board anyway.
But the FPGA stuff would offer great potential. Do you have a rough idea
of how long it will be until the version 3 boards are manufactured?
Hmmm... maybe that's asking how long is a piece of string:) But even an
approximate idea would be useful.

Another issue is that we were planning to network our robots using
wireless cards in the CF slot. So our plans would change if there was a
move away from the CF slot, or if an alternative method for wireless
networking was implemented because you were taking advantage of the PXA27X
chip.


> (By the way, Tim, I can't send you mail directly because of some
> overzealous (wrong, even) spam detection at mx.cam.ac.uk)

Yeah, sorry about that. But you can imagine how many spams they get sent.
It might be worth trying "eng.cam.ac.uk" as a suffix, as that will go
through a different system but end up in the same place. Or else, I might
be able to ask the computer service to let your mail through. How's it
sent?

thanks
Tim