Working on getting things to work on the Chumby

Recently I've been working on a couple of things related to my robot project.

1. Getting Chumby and Arduino to talk to each other via USB serial. I've successfully completed a simple test where the Chumby sends an ASCII message to the Arduino, and the Arduino then shows the message on its LCD and echoes it back to the Chumby. Still to be done: writing a proper communication protocol that will be used by SHORT-E.
2. Trying to build and install a working version of the OpenCV computer vision library for the Chumby. It has not been easy. The current status is such that I managed to compile and install OpenCV, but for some reason it cannot load JPEG or PNG images even though I have built libjpeg and libpng for the Chumby and they work ok with other software (at least Fswebcam is able to use them). And even worse, OpenCV cannot seem to get proper frames directly from my webcam, even though it manages to trigger the camera to capture something.

I had to use OpenCV 2.2.0 because I couldn't configure the latest version not to support Python - and OpenCV's stupid CMake configuration scheme makes it next to impossible to cross-compile a version that does support Python. And I do have Python on my Chumby.

Currently I'm able to use OpenCV with BMP images, and I've found a piece of code that does JPEG to BMP conversion using libjpeg. I'm still hoping to get OpenCV to support my web camera by trying to compile a version of OpenCV that uses FFmpeg. First I'll of course have to build FFmpeg for the Chumby.

I'm hoping to be able to implement some sort of simple tracking functionality using OpenCV. E.g. have SHORT-E find and drive to a red ball or even follow a moving person. Hopefully Chumby's processing power will suffice for something like this.