This evening the BeagleBone Black was finally unbolted from Terry. All the sensors, servos, gearmotors, PWM partial update moosed down RGB DMD screens are controlled from ROS now.
In the process I replaced the physical pan subsystem with a torque multiplied 6 rpm gearmotor. Its 80-24 multiplication giving 1.8 effective rpm at the pan. Unlike the previous setup, the torque is now so high that you can not manually turn the pan system. It occurred to me that this is also a minor hazard as if you get a finger in the gear mesh it would not lead to a "nice place". This is also now using a hollow 1/2 inch metal tube, so I can add a slip ring to allow the pan and tilt to rotate freely at will. I can also much more easily include an IC based pot to close the pan feedback loop with high precision.
It has been interesting going from a board with so many headers for SPI, I2C, UART and GPIO to a general purpose small desktop motherboard running the show. The upside is that things like SLAM and localization which would be tedious to reimplement myself are now available. It might be fun to play with Monte Carlo localization on an mbed based MCU (target point at around 100Mhz/100kb sram). But that's for another day.
The next trick is bringing together the launch files for each subsystem into a Terry-Main.launch that brings it all up.
Pictures and video are extremely likely to follow.
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