Built up the pan-tilt camera unit and distance sensor sweep

It's Saturday and I was given the chance to,work on some Robotic elements that I have been neglecting. I took about an hour to make up
a Pan/Tilt unit with some spare servos that I had laying around. I was also able to make up a sensor sweep with an additional servo. The two units look like this (sorry for the poor picture quality, crappy camera on the iPad):





The Pan/Tilt unit on the left has a servo mounted vertically for Pan and a servo mounted horizontally for Tilt. The webcam is a Microsoft Lifecam with a IDE field of view and a built in microphone. Here is a close up.





The servo mounts are some that I had left over from two years ago when I was diddling with Robotics. The sweep unit uses one servo mounted vertically.





The L shaped bracket has an IR distance sensor mounted on it. I am hoping to interface these two units to a Palolu Maestro servo controller. I did see where someone had written a Python library to control the Maestro using ROS. So now you know what direction that I am headed.

Building the ROS Core and OpenCV

I was able to have Presidents Day off and my wife is out to lunch with my daughter. This is a perfect time to get up to date with my RPi things. I decided to load OpenCV and ROS onto one of the 16GB SD cards. I am currently following the instructions on http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Debian. The instructions are a little old, but do have some steps for a Wheezy build which is the current Raspbian build on the RPi website. Apparently I performed some of this setup earlier but I don't remember it. I think that I am going to have to start keeping a logbook in order to make sure that I don't repeat myself again. That is probably a good topic for an RPi Tip.