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&#39;t know how available their products are to you since you live in Australia.  I wrote a simple program for the basic stamp (parallax&#39;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.  <div>
<br></div><div>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</div><div><br></div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Chris Brown <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:chrisneilbrown@gmail.com">chrisneilbrown@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Hello,<div><br></div><div>I&#39;d like to start playing with some robot hardware integrating ROS</div><div>I have some electronic and programming skills</div>
<div>Are their any simple cheap development kits out there</div>
<div>Please note that I do live in Australia and certain products may not be available or costly to import</div><div><br>-- <br>Chris<br><br><br>
</div>
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