Raspberry Pi 2 for Robotics

I just got a Raspberry Pi 2 in my hands and hope with its help to add some cool features to my new robot projects, beyond the capabilities of the trusted Arduino. The specific goal, besides just tinkering around with something new, is to get basic computer vision working, using OpenCV and a webcam, or the Raspberry Pi Camera board.  Here is a great project by Samuel Matos for inspiration:

You should check out his Electronics and Robotics blog for more details.

I will document my progress, as I slowly get my bearings with the Raspberry Pi and all required libraries and peripherals. Here is the plan:

1. Raspberry Pi initial set-up and configuration
2. Configure remote access to the Pi via SSH and VNC from a Windows / Linux PC
3. Add WiFi to the Raspberry Pi using a USB WiFi dongle
4. Test the GPIO: the Raspberry Pi version of the Arduino Blink example
5. Add a USB webcam and install the necessary tools to control it manually
6. Learn to control the webcam using Python, or some other programming language
7. Install the latest stable version of OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi
8. Get familiar with the image recognition tools included in OpenCV
9. Set-up object tracking, using OpenCV, Raspberry Pi 2 and a webcam
10. Add a battery power supply to the Raspberry Pi, so we can put it on a mobile robot.
11. Build a cool robot that would leverage all of the above!

As I get these items above checked off, I will create dedicated posts and link them from here.