BeagleBone Black / Raspberry Pi / etc.

[r00t]

I bought a BeagleBone Black (only $45) a couple weeks ago and due to low supply and high demand I only recently recieved it. It's essentially a Raspberry Pi (single board computer), except it has like ~60 GPIO pins instead of like 8 (for attaching things like sensors and motors, etc). It also has a lot better specs than the Pi, which is only $10 cheaper.

My main goal in life is to build a robot that will chase my kittens around and shoot them with a water cannon. I plan on building a wheeled chassis that can flip upside down and still drive (in case it gets knocked down the stairs by an angry kitten). I plan to use infrared and ultrasonic sensors for navigation in addition to stereo video for image/pattern recognition. I don't really have a timeline as to how long this will take to get the software and hardware running decently, but I am guessing at least a month or two. I was going to attempt this with just a microcontroller, but it became apparent that as the more features I wanted to add to the robot, the more that multithreading would be necessary. Programming finite state machines in C is only viable to a certain point, then you kind of need the overhead of a complete operating system. I plan to install Arch Linux on it which is the most stripped down version I know of, then write a threaded GPIO framework in C++11.

I also have plans to try and run EQ off of it, through Wine, but I need to obtain a MicroSD card and a MicroHDMI cable for it. I'm not sure what the graphics processing capabilities are, but I do think it should be able to at least boot up and run at a choppy framerate.

Anyone else played around with these kind of boards before, done some cool stuff?