Arduino

[shakesc]

Sorry, had it in my head for some reason. Blame the Christmas eggnog

On the flip side there is a wealth of information around on Arduino.
It really comes down to what the requirements are.
A learning exercise is one thing. If thats the case then a raspberry pi is also a good platform though not so strong in the robot control area yet

I've spent alot of time reading the posts on the Arduino forum (blame the Christmas telly)

I do recommend http://rcarduino.blogspot.co.uk/

There are also tutorials on youtube

The platform has limitations. There are typically only a couple of hardware interrupt pins and the code examples I've seen are single threaded. Some interesting posts

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,105573.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,50539.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,60508.0.html


Most of the fighting robot applications I have thought of are achievable with some simple analogue electronics and at worst a PIC. Horses for course really. If someone is beating your bot or trying to catapult it through the air keeping it simple is important

[shakesc]

thanks to the Antweight guys also found this link
http://www.robowars.org/wikka/PololuB328

[john_frizell]

Or you could try Picaxe. http://www.picaxe.com/
They supply lots of kits [go to the right top of the page and click shop] and a free programming editor. They run BASIC [which is quite powerful these days] and their bottom end chip supports 4 outputs and 2 inputs, takes about 400 lines of code and costs £1.80. I have several autonomous robots which use their stuff.

[shakesc]

Picaxe was used on this

http://robowars.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=494