Linux

Ok I am planning on building a "small" humanoid robot that can has computer vision and can do many tasks. I am planning on using a small onboard computer to do all the processing so that it can be autonomous and reduce the need to have another computer on for it to work. Anyway I am looking for a small, not expensive, and easy to use, some what powerfull small computer or single board computer that has usb ports,can run off a small battery and can run lunix. I am thankful for all suggestions.

Hi there!

Is there anybody who knows an inexpensive motherboard yet powerful enough to be able to run Linux OS? I have already dicovered RoBoard and Mini-ITX motherboards, but I am looking for something else if there is any!

I just learned about a thingy called zipit. Apparently it can run a linux distro and then the world is your oyster. Click the pic.

Just mentioning it here so I will ind it again when searching my fav search engine.

I came across some posts on a different discussion board about a nice Wireless internet radio clock called Chumby One. I have found out that it has linux inside and is easily hackable to be used as a robot brain. There are already sample bots out there, I have just started to look into it and thought it might be interesting for some of you. I have almost no knowledge of how linux stuff goes and I don't think I can do much with Chumby at the moment, so I will be interested if some of you guys manage to make it your robot's brain. Perhaps using Python? or Processing?

Hi,

I was wondering how many of you guys used linux? I use Ubuntu on my laptop, but am ashamed to admit that I have to use Windows on my desktop for things like, well just sketchup... 

So how many of you use linux and which distro do you use and why ? :)

The problem:

I have a weather station project going on and I'm planning to use my Linux box for data logging. I have ATMega168 writing data to its USART, FT232R doing USB serial (see my first SMD soldering here: http://letsmakerobots.com/node/23323) and Ubuntu Linux logging data. Here's a simple picture of the setup:

Weather station data logging test setup

I am using my Ubuntu laptop more and more often. And today I found myself wanting to throw together a simple schematic for posting on LMR. So I needed to find a CAD program for that. One that works on Linux.

Shouting in the shoutbox is fun and all, but valuable info gets lost. So please everyone, use this thread to post your experiences and recommendations.

So far I discovered in my Ubuntu (10.04) repository:
kicad
geda
eagle

google them for links or downloads. I will post my experiences with them here as I gather them.

These images were created by stepping a pair of servo motors to create a file containing sensor readings for each possible servo position.

I took 3 readings for each position from each servo and stored them in a file, then read the data back in a seperate pygame program running on a desktop to generate the image. RGB values were generated from the 3 readings from each sensor.

The creators of Linux Axepad have created a .deb package for Ubuntu users. I was having issues with the other version off of rev-eds site. So far no issues with this one. 

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1113839

Once you have it installed you have to open a terminal and run "sudo linaxepad"

I am yet to try it, am downloading for the first time as I write, however, just released:

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/ -> Software

I am a total beginner at both programming and robotics (I have been using Linux as my sole OS for the past 4-5 years, so I've been plenty exposed to programming and programming languages).

A few days ago i got 4 * AT89C4051 chips from a friend as i told him I was thinking about jumping in to the robotics world. But i need a programmer circuit for them, Atmel have a list of official distributors of programmer but they are rather expensive and only seem to work with Windows.