BSDCan2014 - 20140606

BSDCan 2014
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Fabio Balzano
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 2 - Sat May 17 - 2014-05-17
Room Montpetit 202
Start time 15:00
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 461
Event type Podium
Track Embedded
Language used for presentation English
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FreeBSD and Beaglebone Black, a robotic application.

FreeBSD and the ARM based Beaglebone Black board. Demonstrating a ROV with I/O and video streaming.

An embedded ROV powered by FreeBSD and Beaglebone Black. It demonstrates the usage of the flattened device tree (FDT) plus video streaming by WIFI and motor drivers remote control. Opencv features and power actuators by MOSFET drivers.

This talk is about a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with I/O management for sensors and motor drivers. The system runs FreeBSD and offers a webGUI over WIFI to control the movements and watch a video streaming from the onboard camera. The platform used is the popular embedded board Beaglebone Black with a custom cape (shield) on top for the I/O connectivity. Beaglebone Black is an ARMv7 system with integrated RAM and flash memory for the root filesystem, it offers many more capabilities such as input/output pins ready to connect to sensors and actuators. BBB has enough processing power and speed for Opencv tasks, networking, web services and GPIOs I/O. This robot can be controlled remotely by a joystick or using the controls on the web GUI. To manage GPIOs and the output for the motor drivers, it was used the FreeBSD flattened device tree (FDT). To keep the system reliable and fast, a custom kernel was compiled and the system environment was carefully prepared.

The list of features available: -Remote control of the motors via WIFI (webGUI or Joystick) -WIFI hotspot -Video streaming from the onboard camera -MOSFET actuators -Sensors collection to gather environmental data -OpenCV video features -Stepper motors to move a robotic arm and video camera -webGUI with websockets