AusRobotics

After a few weeks of twiddling, I've finally managed to get (i) a 2.6.2x linux kernel, and (ii) a root filesystem with native gcc, going on my 2 AVR32 systems.

One board is the "original" NGW100 with 2 ethernet connectors, a usb device, an sd card, and a few other bits out of edge connectors.

The other -- more problematic -- board is the "Grasshopper" from in-circuit.de.

It turned out most of the s/w available through the Grasshopper forum (embedded-projects.net) or via other misc sites was  pretty rotten. Mostly because it was based on a very buggy gcc 4.0.4 that tended to (a) core dump or get compiler errors such as "unreconised instruction" (gcc-speak for "I have not been configured for this hardware properly!"), or generate code that did core dumps for no reason (maybe bad instruction binary).

Anyway, that now seems behind me.

The 2 boards will form part of a multiprocessor I'm building for an outdoor/indoor "big bot".

Among other challenges, I've been persuaded to first look at building a "navigation module" based on some cheap compasses, accellerometers, tiltmeters, and a GPS (or maybe this will have to be located elsewhere, for "noise purposes") and -- of course -- an AVR8 or somesuch to control it all and provide some kind of serial i/f to the rest of the world.

The s/w side -- which is usually what interests me since the h/w just DRIVES ME NUTS! -- is pretty interesting. As usual, all of the data "should" be smoothed and fused together to provide a good estimate of the present location and velocity.

A not-so-simple Kalman filtering job via a Riccati system seems to be the way to go, but I'm still looking at making up some kind of particle filter to do the work. Probabalistic processing is supposed to be better than simply "fitting a line to a bunch of data", after all. ;)

I've attached the YouTube ref to the Grasshopper. Unfortunately, I found the board before I saw the demo. :) (The board doesn't come with the nice edge connectors, neither!  But at least it was < 70 Euro).  (Don't believe the prices quoted in the links I've given, above; they include German tax!).