Darwin Mini and Raspberry Pi : call for contributions

[Vincent14 offline]

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkoLh1o-qhk

You already know this $500 small brother of Darwin OP, also 3D printable, published two years ago. I've waited for a long time but nobody tried the experience: I would give to Darwin Mini a motherboard under Linux, to bring him intelligence, full autonomous behaviours, robots cooperation, visual recognition and more.

According to me, it miss some key features:
- a Raspberry Pi (because of the community and available ressources) for connected applications, intelligence, autonomy, vision etc
- a Pi camera module (hardware accelerated) in the head (for direction)
- one or two microphones (on arms for directional analysis ? only one in the chest ?)
- a speaker (Text To Speech, choregraphy...)
- an IMU (accelerometer, gyroscop, magnetometer, compass...) in the chest (for stability and precision)
- two hands, to grab objects, climb, or anything else

I wish to find people to brainstorm about these features, share ideas and then build the necessary 3D model parts.

For example, we can use Darwin OP hands as model (middle picture):


My skills are mainly IT development, I made a little OpenSCAD but I don't know to use either SolidWorks neither FreeCAD, that's why I need your help! I've created a topic on the Poppy project forum because I'm convinced their framework is designed for Dinamixels motors programmation.

The Poppy project is creating an ecosystem similar to Nao, in Free Softwares, adapted to every robot using Dynamixels servos, through their Python library Pypot. Poppy Humanoid is the most famous robot from this project, but the framework allow to easily define a custom robot called a Creature.

However, my only goal for now is to find the most adapted motor driver, a good Raspberry Pi version and design the new 3D parts on the Darwin Mini. You're free to join the thread on the other forum or to share your ideas here. Once this robot will have a embedded Linux, everyone will be free to program as he wish.