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Body Hardware Completed, Software & Head Next

A project log for Love Elemental

A fuzzy, glowing, touch-responsive serpent using ROS + SOTA machine learning to make lifelike behavior.

david-greenbergDavid Greenberg 12/15/2021 at 17:451 Comment

After nearly a year in R&D, the Love Elemental's body's hardware is pretty much done.

She's got 7 working segments with custom electronics and controls: each segment has a 120MHz Cortex M4 microcontroller that handles the LED visualization, motion planning, battery charging, and CAN-FD communication. The 'head' (which is a stopgap for the real thing) has a Lattepanda Alpha, which is a crazy-fast nearly 4GHz x86 board that's the size of a raspberry pi.

With the LEDs mounted on the ribs, the fur effect is definitely looking awesome!

The actuators are Lynxmotion LSS-HT, but I'm running into issues with overtorque or shutdown situations. Hopefully it isn't long before Ellie is swimming across the floor.

Discussions

Dejan Ristic wrote 12/23/2021 at 15:10 point

What a beast!

Looks as if one of those prehistoric mega-centipedes mated with a vacuum cleaner or something :D

Hope you'll post a video of it in action when you get done with the software. Very cool!

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