Thought some of you (esp. Linux_0 and MU_Engineer) might be interested to hear about my robot I made last Summer (a little late, I know, but between then and now I was really busy, hence my absence)

A link with reports and such: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~bmouring/

Basically, I got a small PC/104 single board computer with an Intel XScale (ARM-based) processor. This board was responsible for receiving the video stream from the camera, parsing out individual frames from the video stream (which required a modification to libjpeg), decompress the jpeg-compressed frame, run various filters on the image (simple gamma distance, vertical-enhancing sobel, and horizontal/vertical histograming), run simple AI on the results (fitting to a profile to give a confidence value to how likely a block was located and not, say, a same-colored ball), then communicate the results to the microcontroller board. The microcontroller board (which was programmed using eclipse coupled with a gcc toolchain that was built to target ATMEL uC's) would take this info (along with sonar rangefinder info) and head toward the block. If something got in the way of the robot before it got to the block, it would avoid the obstacle, reacquire the block visually, and continue. Once it picked up the block, it would then try to find me (actually, my black shoes) and return the block to me.

Once again, showing Linux is more than just wobbly windows.

Up next: a UMC controlled mini-mill. Can you say "homebrew prototyping"?

Awesome!

Thanks for sharing!

Great job!

Speaking of CNC I've always wanted to get a Zenbot or build my own but alas I don't have the funds at the moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHS8rdesx-8

That's one nice little project! I think it nicely shows how from a few building blocks (no pun intended) you can create a complete system. Very much in the Linux spirit.

The course I made the robot for has traditionally forced (or strongly suggested) you use WinAVR+AVR Studio, a Windows-only toolset (which, funny enough, is based off of the avr-gcc toolchain). When I explained that I wasn't going to use those tools but instead roll my own dev environment, he basically said he didn't support my decision and if I needed help I was on my own (well duh). After he saw I got results using this toolchain (which was also usable on his precious Macs) he asked me to write-up how I did things. Funny how things change, but more importantly it illustrates why I like Linux in the first place: I was free to choose one of many options (i.e. I found no guides on how to hook avr-gcc and especially gdb-server+avarice to Eclipse) and it was actually superior to the de facto (CVS support which I used for code tracking and synchronizing between my machines, better debugging capabilities).

We need more geeks such as yourself

This clearly demonstrates the power and potential of open source, open standards and open platforms.

Nice work bmouring! Love seeing a project that combines two of my favourite things, robots and linux