Dear Diary,

Not a lot to report, I've been away from ye olde robot lab (aka the closet in which I keep my stuff) while house-sitting. Fortunately I've been able to spend some of this downtime researching ROS. Now I'll at least have a clue what I'm looking at if I decide to try to make it work on the BBB (on Debian, so it may be tricksy).

I've been trying to figure out an intelligent yet low budget way of building a 5 to 7 DOF manipulator arm. And if that wasn't difficult enough, I actually need two of them (in order to have Ruprecht properly help carry out my world domination plans). After drooling over the premade servo brackets at LynxMotion for a while I finally hit up the wife to let me acquire some knockoff versions in greater bulk. "See dear, I'd need at least $75 worth of bits from here, but this whole kit with three times that many only costs $86!" Interestingly enough, she consented.

After sneaking a half dozen metal geared servos onto the order I think I may have enough bits to pull off something close to what I'm imagining. Shiny.

This weekend I need to re-lower-profile-motize the '1284 deck (I decided I didn't like its height after the last post) then I'll get the BBB deck on and start building me some arms.