I am trying to do some "computationally intensive" tasks using an activity bot and I am wondering whether you can replace propeller with a RPi or attach a RPi on one of these robots. Any ideas?
The Pi has a UART on it's GPIO header pins. I know nothing about the activity bot but I guess it has a couple of Prop pins free that can be used as a UART. Bingo you have a serial connection from Pi to Prop.
Best part of all this is that you can run PropellerIDE on the Raspi so if the Raspi is mounted on the bot then the bot has it's own development environment.
Alternatively one could setup a WIFI link from Prop to Pi using those cheap ESP WIFI modules. And have the Pi remote from the bot.
I'm doing something similar as well. I am building a robot which I want a web based page to control the robot with video feedback. I'm going to have a Pi Zero with a PiCam serially linked to a Stingray control board. Right now I'm testing the serial as Heater mentioned with a Pi Zero hooked up to a Quickstart board so I don't need to haul the robot around during development.
The Pi Zero will handle the video, web server and wifi (via a wifi dongle). The Stingray control board will control the motors, a ping and a infrared remote control.
I'm on the first phase of it sending serial commands using minicom on the Pi. I can turn on different LEDs by doing this. The next step is to write a C program on the Pi to flash LEDs then to use NodeJS to create a page to control the LEDs. Then I'll add the Ping, motor control and IR reader.
If you are going to use node.js you don't need to write any C code to control the LEDs on the Pi.
Just access the LEDs from your node.js web server. In fact your node.js will be your application. It just happens to serve web pages as well
I have a simple demo of displaying GPIO inputs on a web page and controlling GPIO outputs from the web page with node.js and websockets here: https://bitbucket.org/zicog/pigpio2html
Comments
The Pi has a UART on it's GPIO header pins. I know nothing about the activity bot but I guess it has a couple of Prop pins free that can be used as a UART. Bingo you have a serial connection from Pi to Prop.
Best part of all this is that you can run PropellerIDE on the Raspi so if the Raspi is mounted on the bot then the bot has it's own development environment.
Alternatively one could setup a WIFI link from Prop to Pi using those cheap ESP WIFI modules. And have the Pi remote from the bot.
Bill Henning has a propeller hat for the RPi. Check out his web site for info.
http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/153275/propeller-add-on-for-raspberry-pi-robopi-the-most-advanced-robot-controller-for-pi/p1
Jim
The Pi Zero will handle the video, web server and wifi (via a wifi dongle). The Stingray control board will control the motors, a ping and a infrared remote control.
I'm on the first phase of it sending serial commands using minicom on the Pi. I can turn on different LEDs by doing this. The next step is to write a C program on the Pi to flash LEDs then to use NodeJS to create a page to control the LEDs. Then I'll add the Ping, motor control and IR reader.
https://www.parallax.com/product/32230
If you are going to use node.js you don't need to write any C code to control the LEDs on the Pi.
Just access the LEDs from your node.js web server. In fact your node.js will be your application. It just happens to serve web pages as well
I have a simple demo of displaying GPIO inputs on a web page and controlling GPIO outputs from the web page with node.js and websockets here:
https://bitbucket.org/zicog/pigpio2html
Similarly there is a serial port module for node.js.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/serialport