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Thu, 11 Oct 2007
Status update, including Lantronix Wiport WLAN support for SRV-1 Blackfin camera board
We continue to make good progress. The motor control board prototypes worked well, so production quantities of the motor and radio boards have been ordered and should be here in a week. We have a large portion of the SRV_protocol functions already implemented in firmware, and should wrap up the rest in a week. Some of the existing SRV-1 software support (e.g. MSRS, Roborealm, Myro, etc) will require minor modification to support the WLAN TCP connections in addition to COM port connections, though SRV1Console and pySRV1Console already support TCP connections.
One quick note on the firmware - the initial boards will ship with the u-boot loader and SRV_protocol support built with the GNU bfin-elf toolchain, similar to the way our ARM7 code was structured. There will be a working version of Linux as well for download. However, we haven't yet decided whether there is a need to support SRV_protocol in Linux, as it looks like we will be able to embed a full Python runtime with a reasonable set of libraries in the Linux image. Also, we will eventually be porting the Ch C/C++ interpreter, so we expect to support be some very nice embedded scripting options, adding some SRV-1 function libraries for these languages.
Other news - due to a number of requests from existing SRV-1 users who purchased Lantronix Wiport expansion boards, we have added Wiport WLAN support for the Blackfin. The layout for this board is now found on the SRV-1 Blackfin info page. The Wiport Radio Module is functionally equivalent to the Matchport Radio Module, except that it doesn't support headers for XBee, as the XBee and Wiport headers interfere. Existing SRV-1 users who plan to upgrade to the Blackfin controller will need to specify whether they want Matchport/XBee or Wiport radio support.
We still expect to make first shipments of SRV-1's with Blackfin in about two weeks, assuming the processor cards arrive as scheduled. There is a already a substantial backlog of orders and reservations, but we will try to keep everyone updated on expected ship dates once we actually begin shipments. If you are planning to order but haven't submitted an order request, you should probably do this sooner rather than later - send an email to support@surveyor.com
Posted Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:25 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...