I am assuming since you are interested in ROS, you are running some flavor
of Linux already, thats step one.  What I did to get started with ROS was
actually use ROS and a Parallax Boe-Bot.  I bought a Blue-SMIRF bluetooth
modem from sparkfun electronics but I don't know how available their
products are to you since you live in Australia.  I wrote a simple program
for the basic stamp (parallax's controller) to send sensor data and accept
motion data to/from my laptop over Bluetooth.  I wrote a wrapper that then
resided on the PC and I was running ROS on the PC, but it was controlling
the little robot.

The thing is you could take an existing robot you have and write a layer to
allow ROS on the PC to talk with it. - Nathaniel



On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Chris Brown <chrisneilbrown@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'd like to start playing with some robot hardware integrating ROS
> I have some electronic and programming skills
> Are their any simple cheap development kits out there
> Please note that I do live in Australia and certain products may not be
> available or costly to import
>
> --
> Chris
>
>
>
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