to mark as completed MegaQuad MKII
The old bot had 3DOF per leg using 9g servos :( I'm using Inverse kinematics for his movement. I just started programming him and got the IK working for one leg. The ping((( is just stuck in the mega2560 for now. I'll be adding a tilt/pan head when I get more servos, and the wiring needs some cleaning up :p I just found out about LMR last week and so far it's awesome! The thing underneath him in the picture is a stand I made with my 3d printer to get his legs working correctly, very handy. More to come.
**** UPDATE 9 - 23 - 12 ****
Well the little guy above is no more, as you can see in the picture below, he went through the disassemble process. The reason for this was I thought I had a pile of bad servos. Upon powering the servos the bot would go into an epileptic fit. At first I thought that the pots were dirty, but a teardown revealed that they were fine.
My original intentions were to build a V2 bot when I got the code working for the V1 bot, but things change and you just have to adapt sometimes. As it turns out, it wasn't the servos that were bad, it was the cheap oxidized jumpers that were the bots untimely demise. This wasn't realized until it was time to center the new SG-5010's for the leg assemblies, and THOSE were acting erratic and having convulsions as well.
At the end of the day at least I have a small pile if micros' for future bots, and a good start on V2. I'm currently prototyping a power distribution board while waiting for the Mega PotoShield to show up from Adafruit Industries. I tried etching my own board for powering all of those servos, but most of the traces ended up being open and overall it just wasn't worth trying to save. I'll show some pics just to try to justify the long slow updates . :P
The carcass of MegaQuad Mk1
The parts needed to assemble a leg.
When you don't have the right tools, sometimes you have to make the right tools.
I put a pivot on the back of the servos in this design.
Here is a size comparison with the old bot.
More parts printed and almost ready for assembly.
All the legs attached pretty nicely.
Ahh, that's better, now he can see where he's going.
Still needs the servo board I'm putting together and lots more programming.
Eye level view.
Well, that's all I have for now. Thanks for stopping by, And I'll have some video on the next update. Hopefully it will be sooner than later....
Oh wait, here are those pics of the servo power board fail. :P I guess I owe it to ya if you made it this far through the post. :)
The board before etching, all sharpied up, or so it appears :(
View of the board mostly populated (no signal jumpers, yet), but not soldered. Hence the dangling screw-terminal. :P
View of the back, notice the over-etched traces.
Thanks again and be sure to click on the collect link above.
Obstacle avoidance via ping, hand tracking (eventually)
- Actuators / output devices: SG-5010
- Control method: autonomous, IR remote
- CPU: Atmega2560
- Operating system: Arduino Mega 2560
- Power source: 7.4v Li-Po
- Programming language: Arduino C/C++
- Sensors / input devices: SRF04 PING(((
- Target environment: indoors mainly