There has been quite a large amount of attention about he curiosity rover in the last week or so and deservingly so. I want to talk briefly about the computational ability of the device and how that might compare to something a little cheaper that might lead to some interesting projects.

The mars curiosity rover uses a Rad750 processor, which is bassed on a powerpc processor offering up to 200 MHz in terms of clock speed. Which is frankly not much at all. So why select it? Well because it’s really rather resiliant, it can take quite a big hit of radiation and work in a very wide range of temperatures. Which is fortunate as the surface temp of mars goes down to bellow 100 degC.  A little on the cool side for your average computer chip…

Now the mars rover can obviously do a lot of cool tricks, so how does this relate to the title of this topic post?

Well the raspberry pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) which is probably the coolest piece of technology in the last couple of years has a mightly 750MHz (still a little under the 1.5 GHz dual core chip on my phone) for a not very mighty $25.

So it’s cheap, so what?

It’s also easy, all you need is a composite video cable (or a HDMI cable), and a USB keyboard and mouse an SD card, a USB cable and power source (batteries will do!) and you’re away.  You need to pop some operating system on to the SD card plug it in and you’re done.  You don’t even need the mouse and keyboard (although trust me on this when I say it’s a little easier with them).

OK, so it’s a cheap easy computer, and it’s easy to write computer programs for, well that’s nice isn’t it… But that’s not all…

It has a general purpose input output that is open, which means you can wire in your own devices.  There’s a great little board as an example of this, the gertboard, worth a look.  Which means you could feasibly build your own rover complete with sensors and controlled mechanics from a rather cheap, versatile computer with relative ease… it couldn’t cope with going to Mars but sounds like a great little project…