Here’s something that I’ve been working on for the past year or so. Haven’t had much time, but recently, I’ve been making the time for it! Something evil is brewing…
Looks like somebody’s going into the spider business!
Looks great!
Alan KM6VV
You’ve got 2! 
They look … trying to thing of something awesome to say apart from awesome - failed … WOW! 8) :mrgreen:
looking good. i thought you had an octopod project going on. i think i saw a glimpse of the chassis in another thread. 
i hope you see synchronised movements now that you have two!!
Dance partners!
Alan KM6VV
Oh Man… !
Nothing more to say…
Psst… Humm, Video? 
What did you use to cut those center body parts ?
Thanks guys. Yeah, this is another thread regarding my octochassis that I’ve been working on. Can’t remember if I had another thread on this already on the Lynxmotion forum, but I do have an active on Trossen.
No videos yet, I’ve actually ran my current code and still cleaning it up quite a bit. I found some more bugs in my code, and I’ve also decided to revert back to using the Bot Board + Atom Pro 28 controller board so that I can have a common code between the two bots without having to comment out the serial out code and as well as little syntax differences in the code.
DiaLFonZo - I actually had to contract out the machining to a wonderful little machine shop down in San Diego. I believe the shop is called Funktion USA. I think they make a lot of racing car parts, so I just asked them for a quote on CNC routing and drilling. They did a wonderful job and did a very nice job on the chassis. I just drew it out on and sent them my .dxf and pdf of the detail drawing and my chassis came in a couple weeks later.
It’s been a while, so my memory is a bit foggy, I think it’s a 5051 1/8" aluminum (I might’ve gone overboard with the thickness, but I wanted it to be robust).
It’s a very versatile chassis - it’s symmetric, 8 leg ready, has tons of SES/servo horn pattern, it has pattern for head, pedipalps, tail, and etc. It has center mount section for the 2-axis accelerometer that LM sells. It also has two sets of hole patterns for the electronics. One down right in the center, the second pattern separating the electronic boards sort of like in the same fashion as the “ant” style carrier piece that LM sells, but in the center section of the body.
The most important feature was I added two pairs of slots down the center of the chassis, to accommodate velcro strap for my battery. I didn’t like how the battery were very inaccessible in many of the chassis out there, so I wanted it to be readily exchangeable like in RC cars, so this was one of my most important feature.
The LED was very painstakingly done. I remember the first time I did the LED leg-light kid on my CH3-R, I just forgot how much effort it took! I had to go buy resistors, originally was going to do a surface-mount LED distribution board, but my local Fry’s was a total mess when it came to surface mount parts, so I had to settle with some 1/4W axial resistors. In hindsight, I should’ve just created an account at Digi-Key.
I took a single clad FR-4 hobby grade (MG Chemicals) stuff and just took a ruler and razor blade to cut the traces out. I was thinking about spinning a board with some local PCB houses, but the cost just wasn’t worth it. It was just a stupid board with to put resistors and solder pads for the LED. So the series resistors for the LEDs are on the PCB-side and not on the leg of the LED.
But the work was well worth it. I decided to use some Super Bright Blue LED since I figured a lot of guys with CH3-Rs did it in red (I originally did my CH3-R in red). I did see a green CH3-R out there, can’t remember who’s bot, but it looked good. So I just went with blue.
I bought a pack of 100 bulbs, so I have 92 left 
. I was thinking about bundling some of it up to sort of mimic the multiple eye that you see on wolf spiders, funnel web, and etc.
But I forgot that I was originally doing this project because I wanted to make a scorpion. So I just bought some more brackets and goodies from LM so I’m working on some sort of head or non-leg appendage for this bot.
My second unit (the one with the LED), uses two Castle BEC Pro instead of my usual Hobbywing 8-15A UBEC. I originally had one Castle BEC Pro on it, but it started stuttering and limping, so I knew that I was hitting the current limit on the single Castle BEC Pro.
Castle’s BEC Pro was actually quite nice, the output voltage is programmable, so it’s scalable if I decide to use more than 2S LiPo in the future.
Assuming that I put the same demo code on my first unit (the one with the Phoenix legs) and the second unit, because of the nature of my IK engine, it should walk the same distance given the same time, since the IK engine is based on the distance the body needs to travel, so even if the second unit has longer legs, it should track the same distance as the shorter legs. But this will be proven out in future testing.
Stay tuned, I will have some videos up in a couple weeks, I’ve just been so swamped at my day job lately, it’s hard to find the discipline to work on something so similar to my day job…
Here’s an update. I worked on my IK engine a bit further and cleaned up the rotation gaiting and have both of them sharing a common gaiting and IK engine. Here’s an update video:
Hay pretty cool. Wish you had powered up at the same time.
Looks great. Thanks for the video.