[HH] Rethinking LinuxPC Robot -- the Linux PI Robot

[Jon Evans]

The BeagleBone has 60+ GPIO as well as all the usual embedded buses, and 7
channels of ADC.  Plus, it has Ethernet.  It seems a lot more reasonable
than an Arduino + Ethernet Shield, or a RPi.  Perhaps use one of those for
IO and realtime control loops, and any x86 PC for command and video
processing?  Link them on the robot via Ethernet or USB.  Have all of the
critical safety stuff running on the IO controller, so it doesn't matter if
the PC goes down.  The IO controller can shut everything down if it doesn't
get a heartbeat from the PC.

Although, if your IO needs are mostly processing video coming from USB
cameras, that's a trickier problem to solve without a beefy PC.  Depending
on what sort of video processing you're doing, you may wish to switch to
analog cameras and run them through a FPGA for preprocessing and encoding.
 You could multiplex the video onto a single stream and then provide it to
a PC via USB or Ethernet, and have the FPGA do simple things like motion
detection.


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 7:35 AM, Nuno Sucena Almeida <nuno at aeminium.org>wrote:

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> On 04/07/2013 04:29 PM, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> > Use something like MPI for distributed processing
> > across multiple PI devices
>
> MPI is probably a poor choice for this case ( I used it in the past for
> massively parallel computations ) , you should probably think about
> using ROS:
>
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROSberryPi/Setting%20up%20ROS%20on%20RaspberryPi
>
> Cheers,
> Nuno
>
> - --
> http://aeminium.org/nuno/
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