3 ms·

Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the SBC! Th

Wasn’t sure what made the BeagleBone Blue variant variant good for robotics until I read about the 8 servo drivers and 4 DC motor drivers built into the SBC! That’s going to be really handy for lab robotics projects. Buying a servo hat for Raspberry Pi’s or wiring up my own driver chips for one off projects has been annoying. Thanks! Question, do you know if the UCSD course is using the PRU’s and/or porting ROS to the PRU’s? That’d be really excellent. And of course there’s the Pocket BeagleBone [1] that was released this year. I just preferred 4 for prototyping, primarily since they have the onboard dual 200 mhz real-time processors, are in stock, and have really good support and design specs. 1: https://beagleboard.org/pocket https://beagleboard.org/pocket

mch82 9y ago
Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials to find out. It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed", https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-control/dp/1788293134/ https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-co..., came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft, fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking. My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki: https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers, is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers including BeagleBone Black. https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html

mch82 9y ago

Unfortunately, I'm waiting on the publication of the MOOC and course materials to find out. It looks like the latest book, "BeagleBone Robotics Projects, 2nd Ed", https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-control/dp/1788293134/ https://www.amazon.com/BeagleBone-Robotic-Projects-Second-co..., came out in June and I haven't had a chance to look through it. The 2014 book, "Mastering BeagleBone Robotics", by the same author walked through multiple robotics examples implemented using Python and didn't involve the PRUs. Using only Python, there were examples of a rotary aircraft, fixed wing aircraft, sailboat, wheeled vehicle, and computer vision tracking. My understanding is that TI only recently began improving the PRU documentation to make it more accessible and that Code Composer and other tools TI has created for working with the PRU are maturing slowly. I've never tried using it. Here's the PRU page on the BeagleBone wiki: https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler https://elinux.org/Ti_AM33XX_PRUSSv2#C_Compiler Another thing I've never tried, but that might be of interest to HN readers, is the Nerves project for Elixir development on single board computers including BeagleBone Black. https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html