Stepbot - Brain Drain

As I’ve mentioned before one of my ambitions for Stepbot is to make it work with runmyrobot.com. Using code from their Github repository as a guide, I merged this with Stepbot’s firmware and after a bit of tweaking, success! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIGh1R1_qiA However, I ran into a bit of a snag. Although control is working well, I had less luck getting the video feed to work. After re-working the sending script a bit it turned out that ffmpeg (or in my case, avconv) needs more horsepower than my old Raspberry Pi Model B can muster. That, coupled with it being a single-core processor results in the whole system being brought to its knees whenever I try to fire-up the video feed. So, it looks like I’ll have to perform another brain transplant if I want to make this work. The ideal candidate would probably be a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless, but if the difficulty of getting a hold of a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is any indication, that would probably delay the project indefinitely. Instead I’ll probably just use the Raspberry Pi 2 from Sux0rz until I can find something more suitable. I might also take a look at using my Next Thing Co. CHIP (although I’m not sure it can provide enough power @5VDC to drive the motors…hmm).