Well I have got the first bits of kit together and the trick now is getting them to work. The first exciting part to arrive was the very small Gumstix Verdex XL6P computer. The size of this small embedded Linux computer has to be seen to be believed! The imagery on the Gumstix website really doesn’t do it justice.
The next bit of kit to arrive was a Futaba 3003 standard servo and a serial Pololu servo controller. Initially the servo is to be controlled by the Verdex via one of the serial ports thought if possible the control will move to an ATMega32 board to release the serial port on the Verdex. The servo will be attached to the side of the camera and will provide movement in the vertical plane. This will allow pictures to be taken of the horizon, straight down and straight up.
The development of the code to drive the servo has turned out to be a little more complicated than I anticipated. It must be a good few years since I last coded anything in C and programming the serial port communications is not the easiest place to drop back into it. I have reached the point where everything seems to work fine with a butchered RS232 link cable but when I attach a standard straight through cable it goes to pot. I think that it is probably something to do with more of the pins been connected straight through. There is a bit of code I can put in to make sure that these extraneous connections are turned off. However this involves setting lots of flags and using ioctl functions in C which I know little about and there is scarce documentation on the internet about programming the serial ports.
I have been looking around http://www.robertharrison.org and really am impressed by the good content material here. I work the nightshift at my job and it is boring. I have been coming right here for the past couple nights and reading. I simply wanted to let you know that I’ve been enjoying what I have seen and I look ahead to reading more.
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