Let's explain the project a bit more

So as I said I wanted to create a car that follows me. Ideally it could do a range from barely moving to a brisk walk or a jog but expectations are low as it's the first vision processing project.

After a few weeks of research I decided on the car I wanted to get. Seeing as I can't build for anything I got an almost ready to run rc car from hobbyking. It is missing the battery and the radio setup easy to buy especially because I already had a 3S 5000mAh lipo from a friend who told me to build something cool. Besides that I bought another charger and the cheapest radio 2Ch (turned out to be a 3Ch) I could find. I'm still fighting with hobbyking (when will I learn) seeing as the order came from hongkong and is supposedly delivered but I sure don't have it. Anyway I have some pictures of the car (seperate order) and I'd like to show those.

 So what did we learn... WOW that thing is huge. When they said 1/10th they meant it, but it's the only
one that fit the battery so do what you have to do.

So while doing this I learned a lot about the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and I tried to take decent notes on my mistakes. I later ran a rm command that was improperly formatted and so most of those notes are gone. None the less I have some and I highly suggest watching these videos/visiting this site. Videos Site. This guy teaches a good deal and really helped me get my foot in the ground with BBB. One thing he showed me was the basics on getting BBB to work with a camera for vision processing of course it's not working perfectly due to some bugs with Ubuntu (centOS>Ubuntu) but these I'll touch into later. For now I bought the following camera and here are some pictures of it. Camera Also important note it has H264 encoding which does a lot of the heavy lifting for image processing, very important when working with little processing power

Next was, hey can I attach this to this. It looks like the car would attach to the camera online but... things don't always work out so easily.

These spots have nothing to hold them down what I'm thinking is the best option is to use the machine screw hole on the bottom of the camera and run a machine screw through the car somehow.

Alright last few things I've done while away. Sorry for the length of the post but I have actually been doing quite a bit lately. I setup the BBB to have a static IP sadly I lost the commands for this so use dereks. Just an important note, if you mess up the input like I did you can setup your mode as an ip your ip as a netmask etc etc. Anyway if you need to fix the settings BBB does have an OS but it will only load the hdmi output if powered by the power jack and not usb (at least that's how it was for me anyway) It loads a GUI as well as 2 virtual consoles (ctrl-alt-f1-3) I took a picture of the output not much interesting going on just to show that it works really.

Also I have created the architecture that my code will work around ideally. It will have the following files.

Main, pwmControl, servoControl, tracking, and heartbeat.

I have actually completed the heartbeat code but will be cleaning it up before publishing. I also have some lessons on that one.

Lastly I will be cleaning up both my github repo and my blog page in the coming days I apologize for the mess and hope to see you all as the project continues.