Hi,
I am making a indoor "explorer" robot. The robot will be used to experiment with path finding and AI. I don't have time everyday to "play" with it, so the firmware development may take up to 10 years or more to complete. (it's actually true from my experience with previous project!)

I want to make a very powerful, "future-proof" MCU/CPU board. Which MCU/CPU should I go with?

I am quite familiar with PIC micro and was thinking to use the PIC32 MCU for this project. However, so some reasons, I still don't think the PIC32 will be good enough. I am now looking at the PSOC and even full-blown SBC.

Could someone please give some suggestion?
James

 

If one can guess correctly 90% of the time that a given uC will be around 3 years from now, they'd be doing quite well.

You want over three times that far into the future. My crystal ball is a bit more short-sighted.

By that time, the whole uC scene may be different from what it is today.

Perhaps your best course of action would be to start defining everything possible that you will want for your robot to do, and then start defining your inputs and outputs.

Write some code in a portable C language. Caveat here; better be prepared to write your own library routines if the compiler you wind up using doesn't support the function.

By the time you have defined all of your I/O requirements, and tried compiling some code to see what size you're up to, and the time you need it to execute in, your requirements will pretty much dictate which uC you'll use - perhaps by then, the latest and greatest uC will incorporate everything you could have dreamed for, and even more.

However, by that time most everything will be BGA SMT or smaller, and that's not very hobbyist-friendly. Hobbyists don't drive the market; industry and aerospace/defense does.

You might look at ARM7 or ARM9 uC's. But then again, if you haven't fully defined your requirements fully yet, you need to get cracking on it.

 

No one knows what the future holds. That's why I want to pick the fastest, most powerful MCU available today. If there is a better version, hopefully I can just replace the MCU on the board.

How is the PIC32 performance compare on an ARM7 or 9?
James