Getting Wifi - Connectivity on the beagle bone

Getting the Wifi connectivity on the beagle bone was a tricky process . It took us some time to get to know the packages that have to be installed to get Wi-fi Connectivity on the beagle bone.
We are using the Belkin F5D7050 USB Wi-fi adapter to connect to the Wi-fi networks. The adapter is connected to the USB port on the beagle bone.
After doing a lot of Google search we found that we had to install two packages onto the Linux distribution to get Wifi connectivity on the beagle bone .

1. The first was the firmware required for the Wi-fi adapter . The firmware required for this is rt73-firmware. The firmware was downloaded from the angstrom distribution webpage. (http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/)
2. The second package that we installed was wireless-tools which was also downloaded from the angstrom distribution webpage.

Once we had installed the two packages we had to specify the network ssid and the passphrase in the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file. Once this was done we just restarted the beagle bone and did ifup wlan0 to get the wifi connection up on the beagle bone. 

Installation of Ångström OS on the beagle bone

The installation of the Angstrom OS on the Beagle bone was a quite a simple process . 

1. Download the latest Angstrom Distribution image onto your PC . (Available at http://beagleboard.org/latest-images)
2. Connect the micro SD card to your PC .
3. Write the image to the micro SD card. 
4. Connect the micro SD card to the beagle bone and the power the beagle bone. 
5. ssh into the beagle bone to access the files on the beagle bone.

We followed the tutorial on this page http://beagleboard.org/static/beaglebone/latest/README.htm .

Overview

In this project, we intend to develop a remote control robot with a webcam mounted on it that transmits a live video feed to an Android application on the user's phone. The Android application will be used to control the robot.

Embedded Side:

A beagle bone will be mounted on a small robot. The output pins of the beagle bone will be connected to the actuators of the motor to control the robot. A camera will be mounted on the robot, which will be interfaced with the beagle bone via USB. There will be ping sensors attached on the front of the robot to detect any obstacles within its range. A Wi-fi adapter will be used to connect the beagle bone to the network.

Android Side:

The user will control the robot using an android application. The live video feed from the robot will be rendered on the android application. The user will use the phone's accelerometer to control the Bot.

Components: 

Given below is the list of hardware and software components that will be used in the project.

Hardware:

1. Beaglebone
2. Belkin F5D7050 Wi-fi adapter
3. Parallax Boebot 
4. Webcam
5. Parallax ping sensors
6. Android phone

Software:

1. Angstrom OS for Beaglebone
2. Gstreamer for streaming
3. Eclipse and ADT tools

BLOCK DIAGRAM / ARCHITECTURE:

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog. We are a team of 3 students at the University of Pennsylvania, who have undertaken a project to build an Android controlled robot as part of the Embedded systems programming course