<bfw37@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1166798172.441963.36520@48g2000cwx.googlegrou ps.com...
>I am trying to design a speed sensor for a FIRST robot.

Ahhhh Well, there you go........

The FIRST thing you should have said is that you were doing a FIRST
robot.....

Not that people know what a FIRST robot is....

http://www.usfirst.org/

I watched/listened the video/audio.....

Strange people, wierd haircuts, old blokes and rubbish......

Seriously, other than the excitement I see no substance.

And you may have problems.

Like the Griff says, have a look for frequency to voltage converters.
Unfortunately you still have to interface it to the other stuff to drive
your FIRST robot and most of the competitions stuff looks like lo-tech so
it's not as if you are going to get much help from your team mates.

So, the cunning idea..... which is why this is crossposted to the slackware
group, is you drop one of those optical mice things on the floor. I have
noticed my optical mouse was cheap and it cute and appears to move the
cursor thing quite nicely.

Install a puter on your robot and do some interface type stuff wiv PID
control. (Can I throw up at that statement?)

Then you can call it SlackBot and place it in the LinuxBot category along
with any challengers from other Linux distributions.

SuseBot
UbuntuBot
RedHatBot
KittyBot
BottyBot

Obviously Bill Gates will get really excited about the idea so he will need
a category called NotMovingBot to cover all of his operating systems.

DNA