to mark as completed Where I am now
I started by researching tarantulas and their proportions to figure out the basic shape of the body and the length of the leg segments. I then sat down and started to figure out what size I could afford to build, lets be honest Dynamixels are expensive especially when you need 32x for the legs and one for the abdomen. I finally decided on the XC430's and started to design everything in SolidWorks, adjusting where necessary to physically fit all the components. Once I had the CAD pretty much finished I moved onto the software as I saved up for the servos and other parts. I decided upon ROS and was lucky enough to stumble upon the Syropod Highlevel Controller from CSIRO on Github. After many months of teaching myself coding, ROS, Kinematics, Denavit–Hartenberg parameters and much more. I was finally able to get a modified version of the controller working. Over the last few months I have slowly been buying servos, printing parts and assembling them.