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| The objective of LinuxPCRobot.org is to build a fully functional robotic development platform for $500 or less using linux, commonly available components, a little skill, and some good old fashioned scrounging. |
Some work done on the robot
Submitted by mohawk software on Sat, 2010-09-18 03:34
I took some staycation time, and while most of it was spent camping, some of it was spent resurrecting the robot. (Pictures and video to come!)
Interesting changes:
Replaced el cheapo plastic wheels with more industrial rubber tread wheels.
Removed mechanical hard disk and replaced it with a 4G CompactFlash disk.
Removed NetGear WAP and replaced it with PCI wireless card.
Added a 256M dimm to bring up the memory to 512M.
Updated the operating system to Ubuntu Linux Server 10.04
Refactored source code to work more closely with Phoenix.
Challenges/Concerns
The 800MHZ VIA EPIA motherboard is getting old, and it isn't clear that all code in the Ubuntu source tree will work with the chipset. The VIA CPU may not have all the assumed instructions of the build configuration.
Future
If I work on this more, I am considering getting rid of the single task "pseudo real-time" system and see if standard pthreads will work just as well. Almost certainly, on Linux, they will work on a system that is not heavily loaded, the issue is whether or not pthreads will work on a loaded system.