directions...

John:
a note on a few issues -
First, I agree that it is not necessarily desirable to have a £10 board driving each motor.
There are a number of ways of handling the issue, one of which is use of small controllers, and another is the use of multiple peripherals, i.e. a single node does both motors, and another does the sensors.

It is important not to lose sight of two factors:

1. This is a prototyping system not a production system. A production system of any run length (i.e. the kind where cost is an issue) would have a hardware competent team implementing a already pro typed system, and not need RIDE. The pro typing team might though.
   
   Therefore, it is not important to have cheap peripherals and expensive peripherals, as tbh they are all pretty cheap. I have checked the price of a ethernet PIC. it is "from 4.95". Thake into account this is for thousands. it probably about 8. I am not sure there is a price case.
   
2. The whole point of the ride system is to insulate developers from the bits they are bad at. That doesnt mean that they should be limited to using the peripherals we have implimented, rather it is VITAL that there be a simple way of implimenting new peripherals, and writing programs for them in a way that is ISOLATED from the software guy. For instance writing a class. I like the whole "use memory maps to make pixels look all the same, solder on an ADC or PWM chip" thing. The whole point of using an addressing system was to allow large numbers of peripherals to be connected to a node.
   

There are big issues with the use of PICs, I dont see a case for their use. I think there are software issues with a mixed PIC/proccessor implementation, not least that the PIC compiler must know what type of PIC it is compiling for.
I don't think there is a cost case for a smaller controller, but there may be a size case.
I don't object in principal, but I fear for the "distributed processing" angle to be valid, a pure micro-controller only implementation is not viable, and a mixed implementation will cause issues for both of us. In short, no point, lots of work, so why?

RE linux:
linux is an operating system. PICs dont have an operating system, they just have one program. Basicly the difference between a computer with an OS, and a computer without, is the difference between a GUI and a command line ap. There are some things you just dont need a GUI for, running a webserver is one of them - it just goes off, works and doesnt need to show stuff.

If you wanted a platform to run a distributed processing deamon which could also carry out hardware operations (a cool solution) linux would be a good idea: you'd want multi threading and shit. If we are buidling a robotics suit, linux is not necessary.

The deamon idea is a cool one, lets chat about it next coffee.
I vaguely remember a language called ADA (with its C++, objectADA). might be cool.