The first piece I tackled when switching to the Raspberry Pi 3B+ for Super Mega Microbot was building our existing control software.  The software we used for the 2016 Robogames is largely C++ and was built with SCons, https://github.com/mjbots/mjmech/.  For all our previous platforms for both Savage Solder and SMMB, we had just built the software on the device itself, which while a little slow, was certainly convenient and required very little sophistication from the build system.  Raspian is debian based, so this shouldn’t be hard, right?

One of the major challenges SMMB had in Robogames 2016 was in overall walking speed.  It is using HerkuleX DRS-201 servos, which are roughly comparable to the Dynamixel servos that other entrants were using, but the physical geometry of the robot is such that is hard to get it to move quickly with that class of servos.  The center of gravity is too high, especially with the gimbal mounted turret. The R-Team bots all use very low slung machines that scoot along.  I could go that route, but why do things the easy way?

Super Mega Microbot, that beloved and neglected creation, is due for a facelift. The biggest challenge we had at the last competition was the instability of the USB bus on the odroid-U2 when we had both a USB camera and USB 5GHz wifi adapter attached. Cue 2.5 years of waiting, and one aborted attempt, and it looks like the problem is solved!

The aborted attempt

The challenge in this problem is that almost no single board computers in the odroid-ish form factor have both: