John Palmisano of the Society of Robots writes with news of the Axon II microcontroller, and a matching software library designed specifically for robotics. The board is about 2.5 inches square (even though it looks 12 stories tall in the animated 3D tour above!)

The Axon II, the microcontroller that powers my ERP, has finally gone on sale today. It runs a new open source library called WebbotLib, which works in a similar way to drivers on a PC. A user no longer needs to deal with low-level coding for any common external hardware, as the library is bound to already have a driver for it. Just plug and play, as the demo videos demonstrate.

The Axon II, which sells for $118, is based on the ATmega640 processor with 64KB of flash, 4KB EEPROM and 8KB of SRAM. It includes 58 total IO ports, 16 ADC, I2C, SPI, 3 UARTs, USB, 15 PWM channels, support for 25 servos, and 6 timers. The WebbotLib software library is written in C and licensed under the GNU GPL. For more technical information on the Axon II controller, see the Axon II specifications page. For more video of the Axon II in action, check the Axon II video page.