Bitlash Commander: Web UI toolkit for Arduino

Man this look exactly like what I have been searching for!

My plan is to have an internet controlled wifi/webcam rover to drive around the house/yard. My biggest issue was that I didn't want to have to install any software on the PC I was controlling it from. So, I plan to have a small PC on the rover with a usb video capture device with a camera connected and will stream the video via windows media encoder. I would have an arduino to handle the forward, backward, left, right of the rover with 2 more channels for the camera pan and tilt and a couple channels for lights, a video switcher etc. I wanted to have a website hosted on the rovers PC that would allow me to open a page with controls for the arduino and the video from the camera. This looks perfect!

Now for the questions;

  1. So, how difficult is it to modify the Bitlash controls? Ideally I would like to have a virtual joystick, basically just a circle with a dot in it that can be dragged with the mouse for driving the rover. Like putting it in the top left would make it steer left while moving forward. Is there a GUI I can use to redesign the Bitlash GUI to be something like this? Do the controls act like a continuous input until released and "auto center" when released? If not, how hard would that be to program? I would want it to stop as soon as I released the slider/joystick or if there was an interruption in the connection.

  2. Could the Bitlash webpage be hosted on the arduino itself like on an ethernet/wifi shield? If possible, I could use an RF solution of getting the video to another PC for the video encoding and not have to have a PC on the rover. Or maybe it would be better to use an XBee between the server and the rover/arduino and only have arduino, and XBee and an RF video TX on the rover.

I think there is a lot of interest in this and will be happy to post the final product/info for others to use.

Thanks!