05 Intermission

Due to some exams and assignments this week, unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to work on the system. I'm going to try and get some pictures up of the unit and its functionality tomorrow, however.
Next on the plans is checking the system's Bluetooth capability. I'll start out small on this at first, as big steps can lead to big problems, and I'm not really familiar with working on Bluetooth devices. The Gumstix Bluetooth wiki specifically mentions how to connect to a Bluetooth GPS receiver, which will obviously be useful once I get the Bluetooth running and scanning stuff. The wiki also links to a freely available PDF of a chapter from the book Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs, which seems to deal with the Gumstix's Bluetooth capabilities. If so, it'll be a must-read.

Apart from the Bluetooth, I'll have to check the cross-compilation capability for a C program more complex than "Hello World", and the C++ cross-compilation capability also, as I'm not sure whether our revision has the ability to run C++ out of the box (my gut feeling says no). I believe we'll be using C for controlling the servos (although this isn't set in stone), but it may be beneficial to use C++ for some of the other aspects of the system's development. If C++ isn't present on our revision, I'd imagine that putting a newer buildroot on the system will solve the problem, which I'd be more than willing to do if it made anyone's life easier.

It also seems that we need no longer set up a WIFI repeater on the Gumstix system, as Donal has located one that communicates with a base-station unit located near the router providing the WIFI. Now all we need to do is take the weight of the repeater into consideration when calculating the overall weight of the system. This will take some of the work off the Gumstix set-up and maintenance, and gets rid of the problem of the Wifistix not being able to act as an access point. So that's one hurdle overcome!

To end this post on a good note - we've received the go-ahead to order a (suitably sized) blimp for the project! Obviously, excellent news, as the blimp is essentially the raison d'être of our project.