BeagleBone Black replaces picAxe for robot control

How I took a robot which uses picAxe and replaced the 18M with the beaglebone black.  In some ways, the BBB had a tough time because I could only get three PWMs to work.  Since I was using a couple of servos to move the IR detector all around.  For this demo, I "centered" the two servos and used a backup and turn routine to move the robot away from objects in it's path.





You can check out the whole article on the cWhatIcanDo.com website.

This was pretty fun, though it took a while to decide which pins to devote to Analog inputs and PWM outputs.  Part of this works well, for example, with the picAxe, you have to turn off the PWM to motor drive in order to run the PWMs for servos.  That is why the BBB version can work somewhat better.

I used only the javascript and cloud9 editor.  This was done with an earlier release of the operating software Angstrom.  This disabled the HDMI, which worked fine before the conversion to a later style OS.