@cmackenzie Any news to report from testing the humanoid on the server?
@xan Hope the Netherlands (and the rest of the planet) takes this seriously and doesn’t put all hope in a vaccine. Last time you thought you might have an update soon - any progress? Keep at it!
@zenta Hopefully all better now? Did you take your son trick or treating? Looking forward to an update!
The first big milestone seems like it would be successfully porting the Phoenix code to make this new platform walk (no sensor feedback, terrain adaptation etc.). Sounds like a plan?
Hi @cbenson. Yes, I’m editing up a new video as we speak. Was hoping to post today. I helped out the ROS2 Controls community with two PRs which got approved this week and a third I assisted on in the Gazebo-ros community is pending but required the first two to complete first. In my own branches though I have a working ROS2+ros2_controls+gazebo+lss_humanoid setup.
I feel like Sylvester the cat though. It’s been take a step, rake to the face, take another step, hit a pole, get new teeth, hit a wall kind of thing. I have a comical video to show where I am now. Nevertheless, it’s progress towards the goal.
Lots of progress here. ROS2 Controls+Gazebo stuff working. Identified an issue in my collision models that needs fixing. At the end I review the overall architecture. Most of this map is already done. There is configuration and wiring this stuff together properly that remains and integration of an ML reinforced training algorithm.
Good to know you suspect where the issue is coming from. Servos take up physical space, so having three degrees of rotation at a point results in… breakdancing!
Thanks. Finally got my PC back. Currently working at home since my youngest son are in quarantine due to a local C-19 case in their class. I think we all are getting tired of this…
Need to dig into everything again to make the hex walk. Can’t have a dust-collector sitting on my desk. Might start looking into what @kurte have on his github again.
@zenta - Hope your son and all of you as well are doing well and did not catch it. Looks like the Fall surge is starting around all of our areas. While for a long time it looked like most other countries had a better handle on it. It looks like we are starting a major surge. Unfortunately in the US we never got our levels down to a reasonable level, so I suspect it is really going to spike!
Personally we are still hunkered down here. As I mentioned earlier to you, we have not really been anywhere since March. i.e. we have not been in any stores, restaurants, etc since then. Hopefully at some point we will get our act together and get this under control.
@cbenson - I have had different boards that are working, from a simple one that just sets up an Arduino Uno Headers, such that you can plug in your LSS adapter board, and I have TTL level converters for both the servos and the XBee. Been awhile since I played with it.
I also have another board that has servo connections. Of course everyone can do a real simple quick and dirty setup with the T4 or 4.1 and something like Sparkfun or Adafruit TTL level converters, with wires to hook up to your servos. Can then have a couple of your servo hubs to then wire up to all of the servos.
Sorry I have not gotten much done lately as it is more fun when others are playing along… And Math is Hard
So been having more fun doing things like: working with T4.x and TOF (Time of Flight) sensors. And playing with simple cheap camera and see how to use the Teensy 4.1 capabilities to read in images, using the CSI sub-system which does most all of the work in background using DMA and then needing to hook up extra RAM to T4.1 as to have the camera be able to buffler 2 640x480 16 bit images (Wont fit in normal memory).
Again not very Hexapod specific, but having fun.
Also again I personally am totally open to other hardware setups like ones to run ROS (probably ROS2). I have a RPI4 8mb with SSD sitting here and would be a nice platform to setup an interesting Hexapod.
I am ready to eager to get started again, especially once there are others to bounce ideas and code off each other.
@kurte For what I’ve heard the vaccines will be ready around April 2021. Good to hear from you and you are doing ok and healthy.
I’m trying to run your LSSTestServo program. Changed the LSS baud to 112500 since my servos are currently set to that. Using T4.0. For some reason the only result I get on the serial monitor is the two lines: LSS Servo Test program and Search for all servos.
There are also other USB issues I don’t get. Like if I trigger the program button the T4.0 the USB port seem to get lost and a tiny red light turn on. I probably need to read up on this one…
@zenta - Vaccines - there are several in trials now and maybe by end of year one or more will be approved. However I personally will probably wait awhile until we will get it. Before that I personally want to see some additional information, like how effective it is (Some are only aiming for 50% effective to either keep you from getting it or if you do reduce the severity, hope they are shown to be better than that), plus what are the side effects, who was it tested on, and how long is effective for…
LSS Test program. I probably need to resync everything up and try it again to see what the state of this stuff is. I will try to get to it over the next day or two. Been distracted with other stuff.
Which version of Arduino/Teensyduino are you running? I am currently running 1.8.13, plus latest Beta of Teensy stuff.
Again hope all is well. And I will see what the state of things are.
I hooked up the T4.1 again with my board… Probably need to get the one I was using before that has VIN/VUSB cut. But good enough for quick test.
Looks like I am stil up to date with the Lynxmotion library. Although I am running the branch I have that fixed many of the compiler warnings.
Which I opened in May… I don’t think it is much function change. But you might grab my branch just in case
The Test program did not find the servos. I forgot that I updated all of my Servos to 2500 instead of 5000 (my change baud program shows that). So I update it to 2500 and now:
LSS Servo Test program
Search for all servos
1 - 281
2 - -58
3 - -841
4 - 695
5 - -252
6 - 245
7 - -35
8 - -109
9 - -773
10 - 905
11 - -232
12 - 291
13 - 564
14 - 17
15 - -552
16 - 1130
17 - -292
18 - 345
Done
0 - All Servos off
1 - All Servos center
2 - Set Servo position [<Servo>] <Position> [<Time>]
3 - Set Servo Angle
4 - Get Servo Positions
5 - Find All Servos
9 - Print Servo Values
b - Baud <new baud>
t - Toggle track Servos
h - hold [<sn>]
f - free [<sn>]
r - Reboot [<sn>]
:
Cmd: 1
0 - All Servos off
1 - All Servos center
2 - Set Servo position [<Servo>] <Position> [<Time>]
3 - Set Servo Angle
4 - Get Servo Positions
5 - Find All Servos
9 - Print Servo Values
b - Baud <new baud>
t - Toggle track Servos
h - hold [<sn>]
f - free [<sn>]
r - Reboot [<sn>]
@cbenson I did update the collision models but it didn’t make a difference surprisingly. I’m still working on the problem and making some progress narrowing it down but still can’t put my finger on it.
Finally. Simulation seems to be behaving accurately. First, I realized I had my position limits on joints set to 0 which was causing the break-dancing. That doesnt make much sense but that was it, I put a reasonable +/- 180deg limits on them for now. With this fix the robot was mostly still but doing cart-wheels in-place, wth. Gravity was that of a large asteroid - maybe Eros - by the looks of it. Fixed that but now the floor is lava. Finally after a lot of trial and error on parameters related to friction, surface, stiffness, springs I got the results to look realistic. I suppose it makes sense I have to tell Gazebo material properties of my bot parts so it knows if my robot is made of metal, rubber, feathers or marshmallow.
Thanks @kurte
Have some frustrating moments here. At first I realized two of my servos had the same ids… For some reason id11 was set to id9 (sigh…).
I got the test program to work, well almost work with the T3.1. It returned the angle values ones, then no response from the program. I wasn’t able to enter any command.
Moving over to T4.0 I get some strange USB issues. Causing Visual Studio to halt. Sometimes T4.0 act as com5 and other times as usb:80001/3/0/3. When I got it to compile and upload, the terminal only post the two first lines mentioned earlier.
You can always try the LSS Config on such a bus and do a scan. It will report IDs it thinks are conflicting and at what baud rates… It is a good way to check that quickly in a few seconds!
It definitely can help. Also, you can do mass firmware upgrade of all the LSS and if you already have any of the recent versions, then the ID is conserved, too.
