Hi CEans! Call me ahmed.
Coming straight to the point.
Laptop?? Are you sure? Do you know how much your acer laptop weighs?
Even if we keep the issue of weight aside, there are some other problems with using a laptop.
1. The major problem is with ports: Your Laptop has only one parallel port. Parallel ports are a great help in designing things. For instance, take the case of wheels. For wheels we will be using stepper motors, stepper motors require 4 pulses. So two stepper motors for the two sides, that amounts upto 8 pulses or 8 pins from the parallel port. Now, the parallel port on the laptop has only 8 i/p/o/p pins! How will we configure other things like the arm and other components that will be attached to it? Camera can go to the USB. I think we need atleast 32 bits to program this beast.
2. Weight
3. Size: Its quite bulky
4. Customization: another biggest disadvantage, you cant customize it to fit exactly your needs. All ou can play with is programming, and that take half the fun out.
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Having said all this, I am not completely disagreeing with the suggestion of xheavenlyx using a laptop. There are many advantages to it as well.
1. You have everything assembled! All you have to take care of it is programming.
2. Programming is much easier. With a microcontroller you wil have to go for ASM though there are some compilers available fro microcontrolles hat convert your C program to ASM.
3. Communication part becomes easier with the LAN/bluetooth/Wi-Fi of the laptop. With the microcontroller we will have to go for a serial port (I call this an advantage, but I am in favour of a serial port, it looks professional
)
4. Crazy: We are turning a laptop into a robot, and this falls into the category of crazyness!
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