Well, the boards came yesterday and passed the smoke test (you plug it in and if it doesn’t smoke, it passes). Today I got everything working together: Here’s the daughterboard motor controller, sitting happily on top of mom SPU.

Both are running fine and chatting happily together. That’s a warm fuzzy feeling, right? It sure is for me.

Technical details: the daughterboard contains an Atmega-8 microcontroller and mates with a TS-7260 embedded Linux board from Technologic Systems. The Linux board is the Swarm Processsing Unit, or the SPU as we like to call it. It’s the brains of the system. The daughterboard microcontroller generates motor control signals and reads analog signals from the inertial navigation unit. Petey the Programmer made the prototype version this is based on: thanks Pete!