Just curious to see if any other tech heads here on the Uber Forums ordered an Onion Omega prototyping board? https://onion.io/omega I plan to use mine as an extremely powerful robot controller, at the moment my robots all run on 2 or 3 ATmega 8bit RISC based SoC's communicating via serial. I'm hoping the extra 384mhz, 64mb of ram and extra 16mb flash storage on the onion omega will allow me to run all the code on one processor instead of spreading the workload over 2 or more 8 bit RISC based SoC's. If you have ordered one, what are your plans for it if you have any??
Max, have you thought of using the raspberry pi as a controller? They're cheap and include an 800mhz arm cpu, 256mb ram and a compact flash card slot for storage....
I have 2 Pi's but they are larger than what i want to put in to my robot, The Omega packs similar processing power but in a much smaller form factor and is WiFi enabled without any extra parts. ( by similar processing power , i mean way higher than the 16mhz most ATmega based devices run at) Edit.. The Pi model A and B i have both require a USB dongle to get WiFI
Ah ok, I was just curious I have a pi model b sitting spare, might have to look into driving something with it...
I don't think driving anything with the Pi directly will be possible with out using a second controller specifically designed to drive ESC's and servo's or Stepper motors (that's if you want to make a robot or CNC Machine). Best option would be using GPIO pins 8 and 10 (i think that's the uart port) and serial connect to a dedicated driver board. An example would be using the Pi's serial to issue commands to a SSC-32 servo controller, All you need to do is match Buad rates on both devices and issuing commands is fairly straight forward. The hexapod robot i have is built the same way, it uses a BotBoardDuino as the brain to generate IK walking Gaits and then issues commands over serial to the SSC-32 to drive the servo's to the desired position.
