A Beaglebone, a Blender, a Board, and a Swarm.
Hardware isn’t generally my thing. When it comes to software, I like to break and create. But in my opinion, hardware should just work. But even though that’s another story altogether, it did explain my apprehension when I greeted the UPS guy one morning delivering a BeagleBone Black.
Let’s begin with the BBB. It’s a computer the size of a credit card, which isn’t that impressive if you realise that your phone is a computer. I find the best way to explain it is in terms of two other products, the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. The Arduino is a similarly sized (comes in multiple sizes though) controller where you can upload scripts, plug in a hardware circuit (wires and lightbulb, that sort of thing), and have it control the circuit. Despite its power in hardware control, it only has a small scripting interface for you to do your programming. The Raspberry Pi is the opposite. It’s a full Linux computer (based off Debian), but does not have proper hardware controls out of the box. The BBB provides the best of both worlds: a full Linux system (Angstrom Linux, but of course you can flash your own), and a ridiculous number of IO pins to control circuits. All this awesome power at 45USD.
The next step upon receiving this wonderboard was obvious. Let’s build a swarm of robots. Along with two university friends, Lawrence Huang and Gloria Nam, we set out planning the system.
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