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Beaglebone
The main processor board currently on our robot is a Beaglebone Black. It is powered by the robot's battery and it has a 32GB SD card to serve as our main storage. There are a few processors on the robot, currently a Teensy++ 2.0 and an Arduino Mega, but the vast majority of development will occur on the Beaglebone Black (BBB for short).
There are a variety of ways to shell into the BBB, but SSH over WiFi is the preferred way to connect. We have spent some time streamlining this process and setting up WiFi such that logging in is easy and convenient. After powering on the robot, the BBB will boot up and immediately start to connect to ut-wpa2. After waiting a minute or two, you can connect to the robot at the following hostname:
ieeebeagle.nomads.utk.edu (over WiFi) ieeebbb.nomads.utk.edu (if the BBB is connected using ethernet)
Note that you must be connected to ut-wpa2 in order for this to work. This is because of restrictions put in place by UT's IT department for security. This means that you can't/shouldn't connect to the robot external to the robot room. You should not be logged into the robot unless you are in the room to monitor, as there are multiple potential issues with this that we won't get into here.
Please ask on the Flowdock for an account.
Once you get access to your account, it is your responsibility to change your password to something SECURE.
We have taken great care to set up a minimal BBB with just what we need to get moving. BBB's ship with a bunch of crap preinstalled, and we have removed this to improve memory, storage, and security. Please do not put any persistent services on the BBB such as an FTP server or anything else of that nature. For the love of god, do not install any sort of GUI for the BBB. It will slow the thing down to a crawl, and it is not necessary.
The BBB is not like an Arduino in that we can't randomly cut power and expect everything to be OK. It will certainly work for a while, but eventually someone will trash the filesystem and that would suck. To perform a clean shutdown, press the SMD power button located on the BBB that is labeled "POWER". Make sure to first check if anyone is using the BBB by running the "who" command and possibly inspecting "htop". After about a minute, the flashing blue lights on the BBB will stop and the robot can safely be powered off with the hardware switch.
The BBB's wifi will not work if it is plugged into Ethernet.