BeagleBoneBot

erco

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/semi-conscious/4413238/BeagleBone-Black--A-1-GHz-computer-for--45?cid=Newsletter+-+Communications+DesignLine

Robot in video was built by a Beaglebone 3D printer, and is also controlled by a $45 Beaglebone Linux board.

Martin_H

These mini computers are neat, but I'm trying to figure out the sweet spot for their use. You can use a microcontroller with a radio link (e.g. bluetooth, wixel, or Xbee) to a desktop computer. That way the MCU handles all the lower level stuff and the desktop can remotely program it, and interact via wireless serial.

I've using Wixels with the propeller and Arduino and having a desktop IDE and file system is pretty sweet. If you have one of these mini computers how do you program them?

mindrobots

Martin_H wrote: »

If you have one of these mini computers how do you program them?

How do you want to program it?

Put a WiFi dongle on it and you can telnet/ssh/http to it. The Beagles have web based programming IDE called Cloud9 (similar offerings for the RasPi bunch). You can telnet into it and use any of your favorite *nix tools, you can open an xwindow session to it and go from there with GUI stuff. You could wire (or wixel) a console to it and get in that way for command line fun and games.

SimpleIDE and PRopGCC have been ported to the RasPi (should be able to do the same with the Beagles) so you can program your attached Propeller with those tools.

They can server up web pages, so you can interact that way.

Did I miss anything you might want to try??

Martin_H

Thanks. I was wondering if it was GUI based via X windows, or character cell based via SSH. It sounds like either works as well as HTTP based programming.

photomankc

I was actually planning on using the RaspberryPi for my robot. I want to do some work using the MiniIMU for navigation as well as some video capture and remote alerting. All that will be a bit easier with the horsepower and general connectivity of a small computer. I mean what is there not to like in a full blown computer at $45 and drawing ~500mA? I switched to BeagleBone Black because of the plethora of hardware peripherals. I have 2 I2C buses, an SPI bus, and 4 UARTs, 6 analog inputs, and a ton of GPIO. The drawback is the level of control is very watered down on the new 3.8 kernel on the BeagleBones. For now I'm stuck writing a wrapper for SYSFS access to the GPIO pins (SLLLOOOWWWWW). Pins have to be muxed and setup using the new DeviceTree interface which makes changing function of a pin on the fly a serious challenge.

I plan to use those UARTs to interface to Jazzed's SpinSocket propeller boards for subsystems that need the strict timing that the Prop can provide. The Raspberry has more development of libraries behind it at the moment and a larger following but the BeagleBone Black really spoke to me as a robotics platform. I got the basics working now. Buttons can be read and LEDs blinked so I am happy. I like Arch Linux for it. Simple, fast to boot up, and only has was I install and configure to my liking.