Beaglebone robot. First testing.

Just tested the robot. It will be great. First simple testing for detecting obstacles.

Work in progress

My second bot is getting better.
Already connected and working:

• Step motors with a4988 drivers, 
• DC/DC convertor 12V to 5V, 
• Adafruit 1.8 TFT display (128x160), 
• Maxbotix Ultrasound range finder, 
• Adafruit INA219 Current/Voltage sensor, 
• VCNL4000 IR proximity sensor. 
• USB Wi-fi adapter

Waiting for some connectors to finish it all.
Linux kernel 3.2.33-psp26 (last stable kernel for beaglebone) should be patched for correct framebuffer display.

Driving stepper motor with beaglebone. Part 2

Another robot in project. A few things about driving stepper motors with a4988 drivers.
The board takes about 120-150 mA without driving them and about 1.3 A with motors on. The faster they moves - the current will be lower. With full speed it is about 500 mA.
The stepper motor in stall state can be very hot - I think it is hotter than 60 C. But you can disable the motor in driver control, when it is not active. I disabled them on startup script and enable only when it is needed.
I am using C++ in eclipse with remote gdb from laptop running Ubuntu. The beaglebone using Ubuntu as OS from http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu
Note: The current measured from 12 V power supply.

Driving stepper motor with beaglebone

Beaglebone case

The beaglebone case from sparkfun.com.
I can't mount the 4th screw because of SMD resistors that too close to the mount hole.

Connecting external GPS to ODROID-X (Android ICS)

This bluetooth GPS can be connected to USB. 

I connected it to ODROID-X. After some patches it works.

File that should be patched: android/device/hardkernel/proprietary/libodroid-gps/Android.mk

ODROID-X playing 1080p video

ODROID-X from www.hardkernel.com playing 1080p video with hardware acceleration. Finally one of ARM boards is capable of doing it. I tried it with beagleboard and pandaboard - absolutely no way.
Beagleboard SGX drivers is still under development - forever and ever.
Pandaboard ES is getting really hot. The result - CPU changing clock constantly from high to low. You should install serious cooling system on it.
This one - ODROID-X - is really impressive with customized distribution of Android. This version of Android includes Dice player, that can use GPU hardware decoding. And there is XBMC patch for using this player. The board has great community support.
Ubuntu distribution is still missing graphic drivers.