Beyond Romo

Well, I'm disappointed. I've been using the Romo (http://romotive.net/developers) robot chassis for the past 8 months with an Android phone as the controller. One of Romotive's original goals was hackability, openness, developer-friendliness, and all that entails. I even got around to writing some software to control my Romo (see https://github.com/devalbo/roboplexx-bot-android) via web-browser (over a local network and via the internet) using their software development kit.

However, things have changed from what I can tell. Now, it looks like Romotive's current intention is to use iDevices as robot controllers going forward. They cite difficulties with Android as one of the reasons, and I really can't fault them for that. (They used audio signals to control the motors - I suspect it was challenges with audio systems from different Android handset makers that made the control aspect difficult.)

This mens a platform shift is required. Some level of hardware standardization is one of the things I hope to achieve with this journal. I'm basing the robots I build on open source software and hardware components as much as possible, with the aim of keeping things extendable, reproducible, and low-cost (you know, hacker friendly). I'm feeling good about the choices between Arduino and Raspberry Pi for the embedded piece. Using Linux on these platforms will give me (and everyone else) lots of choices about software systems. The next step is to find a way to get commands from those platforms to motors to make things happen!