johnny555 wrote:Very cool - I'll give a look for that SPRITE article.
I hope you enjoy it! The cover shot was my SPRITE Raspberry Pi based bot.
http://store.servomagazine.com/home.php?cat=475
A digital subscription is only $20/year, and gives you access to past digital issues. That's the subscription I have.
FYI, I also have articles in Sept.2011 (got the cover then as well) and Oct.2011
johnny555 wrote:
Can you give me a basic explanation of what benefits are derived from the RoboPi? Like, what additional applications or uses might it allow for?
Sure!
Basically RoboPi is an eight-core 32 bit RISC microcontroller running at 100Mhz. 10ns timing grain is possible for hard real time I/O by writing assembler code for it. The development tools can run right on the Pi, and include assembly language, Spin, and C/C++.
Think of it as an extremely versatile and high speed I/O processor for the Raspberry Pi, with robotics being one of its primary uses. It off-loads hard real time I/O from the Pi, and comes with firmware to make it extremely easy to use from C. (later I will also make a Python interface to RoboPi, and possibly even Scratch)
RoboPi connects to the Raspberry Pi over the 3.3V Pi serial port, and uses only a single additional GPIO (#17) to reset RoboPi when programming it from the Pi. If you don't want to program RoboPi directly, I made RoboPiLib so all you do is write code in C/C++, include "RoboPiLib.h", and link with "RoboPiLib.o". The API is very simple, and is based on Wiring/Arduino.
RoboPi adds 24 flexible digital I/O's, with each digital I/O being usable as
- digital input
- digital output
- servo output
- PWM output
RoboPi also has an eight channel 12 bit analog to digital converter, and on-board voltage regulation to 3.3V from Pi's 5V
There is a lot more detail on the product page, including the Spin API, and assembly documentation.
http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/robopi/
(the C/C++ API is almost identical, and should be posted before Monday - I am just cleaning it up and adding comments)
Please don't hesitate to ask any questions you may have about RoboPi in the RoboPi thread on this forum!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/viewto ... 37&t=68416
johnny555 wrote:
I'll keep an eye on that thread - interested to see the completed unit with the cam (and the first-person view, especially).