Raspberry Pi

I'm pretty excited!  I finally got my Raspberry Pi in the mail today!  I played with one at a friend's house, and so I'm pretty excited to get started with this one!  I have a few interesting projects in mind....

• Turn my TV into a weather, news, information, etc display
• Raspberry Pi based ROV...

I will admit, I'm most excited about the second option.  It'll be interesting working with Nick to make some custom circuit boards that can expand on the Raspberry Pi's GPIO (and buffer it AND bring it up to 5v from 3.3V).  It'd be nice to be able to write both the topside and the bottomside in Qt as well.  As much as I love the Arduino, Qt's language is much nicer and the whole Qt environment is much easier to program in (once you've gotten used to a full-fledged IDE, that is).  One cool idea that I've had as far as Raspberry Pi based ROVs go is a debug GUI.  Think about it.  You can have your ROV and give it a composite video link in a easily accessed spot.  When you need to check on statuses of different systems of your ROV, check on it's configuration or change it's configuration, you can just fire up the GUI and change it from the ROV.  I personally think that'd be a pretty awesome feature.  I'm just going to have to learn more about Linux now than I ever have before...

In other news, I'm finally going to get around exposing the joystick buttons and hats in Monterey.  I want you to be able to map them to the different relays and to the servos.  Sometime while I'm doing that I want to continue trying to port Monterey over to Android.  I think it would be totally awesome to be able to drive your ROV from an Android tablet.  After I get that done, I need to talk to Nick about getting an IP camera set up so that I can start writing and testing a more pilot-oriented GUI with a nice overlay (or something like that).  

Thanks!

Chris Konstad