PhxBUG - Phoenix BSD User Group

I recently bought an iRobot Create, which is a simple robotics platform. Using iRobot's Command Module is fine if you just want to do stupid robot tricks, but for more complex applications it would be nice to have more memory and more processing horsepower.

The easiest way to get there is to use a normal computer and communicate remotely with the Create. Bluetooth has some problems, and WiFi is pretty power-hungry, but MaxStream's XBee modules are pretty nice. It so happens that I have access to some of this at work. Cool.

Out of the box, the XBee USB developer board wasn't recognized in OpenBSD. I wrote up a quick article on the OpenBSD Journal about getting that going, which turned out to be easy.

At this point I have a two-way serial link from my laptop to the Create, meaning that I can control the robot and read sensor data. I haven't done anything good with that capability yet, but stay tuned for more if you're into this kind of thing.