A while back I started a project called CyPi. To re-create a Cybot with a Pi for it's brains. After a few complications with regards to soldering a decent board onto the pi and feeding battery power into the board. The project was shelved. I'm revitalising this project into CyNeo. Cybot with a Neo for it's brains. In the long run my feelings are it'll be a better board to use. For any one wondering Cybot was a fortnightly magazine in the 90's where you created your own robot. The current progress before swapping the 'brains' was both green LED's had been changed to RGB versions. The default sonar's replaced with HC-SRO4 as I'm to stupid to figure out how to use the default sonar and boards. Removed both the line sensor and IR control board. An extra feature is a 16 x 2 display to help when syncing the wii remote and potentially display other data. One quick break through Ive had with using the NEO is powering from the cybot's main battery pack. This was achieved by splicing a LM2596 in line with the power switch. It works so happy. This thread hopefully should allow me to keep you guys up to date with the progress and me asking really stupid questions. As programming is still all new too me. I had all the coding for each individual components on the pi, IE sonar, rgb leds, display, motor control. However i'd not got to the stage where I could 'compile' them all into a single .py
A quick update. Decided to create a brand new cybot with the neo and keep the original with the pi. So we have created two cybots now, one with a pi and one with the neo. Big thanks to David Smerkous for his GPIO library. Cyneo is built upon this. Control is done via a wiimote using the cwiid library. The latest Neo disc image allows cwiid to work straight out of the can.
Nice project! Just a question: why don't you use the arduino side of the Neo? It is faster in I/O because it is a dedicated controller. The Neo is having this unique function of combining a Linux computer and an Arduino on 1 board. The Linux side is bothered with other Linux OS tasks so python will not always have top priority.
I'm back, Bloody ill meant I spent all day yesterday in bed. Good question, why don't I use the arduino side. Firstly this is my first real venture into using a arduino, used them in UNI but that was just to read midi values. Also i'm not overly confident in programming in C. I'm certainly no master at python but have been using that with the Pi. Another reason not to use the arduino side is, I enjoy tweaking the code and doing that via SSH and running it is quicker than uploading via the IDE from a external computer. Certainly will start utilizing the arduino side at some point. Plus i'm not too sure if cwiid with work on just the arduino side or if I'd have to do something else. This was one reason I wanted a NEO was to play with the arduino side.
