I have no idea what messed up the microSD that had Ubuntu 10.10. I loaded up a new SD with the latest 11.04 image (zcat and dd) and that went pretty smoothly. Meanwhile, I decided to put Angstrom back on that corrupted DS card (worse case it wouldn’t work) withmy development PC (used Linux Mint presently). …
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Category:Robotics
Robotics, servos, microcontrollers
Back to Sensing
Finally had some time to tinker again. This time working on the distance sensing function of eventual autonomic robot. I turned to a good ol’ Arduino for the physical IO. I got a Nano, and this is a sweet little microprocessor. All the functions of an Uno crammed into a little DIP from factor. For …
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Beagleboard + Ubuntu 10.10…Sweet!
Things are just falling into place with this Beagleboard. The Ubuntu distro, although slow on installing packages is pretty damn robust. I have installed a bunch of packages without a hiccup. X11VNC works without any issues, and can access with ultraVNC without much screen lag. My UVC webcam (which can be seen in motion in …
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New Tangent – Vortex86SX is History!
OK. Why spend so much time on a frankly, underpowered system board. Chalk it up to learning experience I guess. That Vortex86 may have been the cat’s pajamas (pulled that from nowhere) about 5-10 years ago with 300Mhz, but the lack of FPU or math coprocessor cripples it nowadays. Less operating systems will use it, …
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Back to Linux
It has been awhile sinced I posted on this. My wife and I have been travelling and other projects have been sandwiched in between (like a whole diversion into circuit building and green energy, etc.). Anyway, I am back to hacking processor boards for robot integration. I am blogging about this because it may help …
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Main Board Regroup
I am starting to have problems with my underpowered x86 board I had already. I kind of hit a wall when going further on the integration of cam for vision processing. Even though the cam is recognized by USB port, the driver stack in Win2K does not handle the cam (I had tested it in …
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Pan-Tilt and Video Figured Out….
After much trial and error and success with PWM and the neck servos (Hitec), I found I was having problems getting the servos to work together using basic pulse width in the Arduino code. Each servo worked perfectly when singled out, but trying a pan-tilt at the same time caused servos slamming to the ends …
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Torso Box and Neck
I got the pan/tilt assembly from Servo City on Saturday. While the unbelievable Packers-Cardinals game was on, I messed with prepping the Styrene box I had for the robot torso. I drilled the holes and installed the STPC SBC towards the back, and the compact flash and power connector fit (wasn’t sure until I tried). …
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Std Servo and Accelerometer Communication
Part of my steps to get the different parts to talk to each other is a basic action/reaction workflow. With all this tinkering, nothing ever works out of the box! I soldered header pins onto a 2-axis accelerometer (Sparkfun) and hooked up to my breadboard. I had two Hitec HS-81 servos for the neck of …
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Messing with the Microcontroller
Now that I got The STPC working with Win2K and Dot.Net 2.0 installed on it, I started on the other aspect of the project – microcontroller integration. My plan is to get the PC board [SIC] to do the heavy lifting and the microcontroller to do the nervous system (think sympathetic) stuff, minute-to-minute. The first …
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