Hello,
This is my first post so go easy on me.
I'll give a little background first. I have been programming AI for about 4 years, I have a BSc Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. My experience is mostly on the software side in particular evolutionary algorithms, machine learning and advanced vision. Working on robots that other people have built, and written hardware drivers for.
I am currently working as an R&D engineer in a team of two for a company that sees robotics as its diversification strategy.
The problem I have is, up til now I have programmed on Lego NXT, and some ready built robots. Now we have reached the limits of these systems and have been asked to build our own. We bought this single board computer,
http://www.glomationinc.com/product_9260.html. The user manual that is available to download only gets me as far as building a toolchain. So I am quite happy developing some C programs in linux, cross compiling these and running them on the board. But I have no idea how to; for instance, plug a light sensor into the board and interface with this to retrieve data for use in the programs.
Any help would be much appreciated.