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A project log for D1 Mini Tote

A version of Tote with the D1 Mini ESP8266 board as a brain.

dehipudeʃhipu 01/29/2017 at 18:480 Comments

I have the little guy assembled (I stole the legs from my first Tote prototype), and it works quite well. However, software is the hard part.

First I had to remap the servos in my servo controller firmware to make them agree with what's written on the PCB -- that should make it much easier to debug everything in the future. I also wrote the Python side of the communication with the servos, and there I had my first problem -- when sending the servo positions too fast one after the other, I get bus errors. For now I just catch them and retry, but I suspect I will need to increase the clock stretching timeout.

Second, the Python code for Inverse kinematics -- I used the original code that I have written years ago for #µKubik quadruped robot, and it seems to work without problems. Yay. Except for some stupid mistakes I made, like multiplying everything by 0, which of course took me hours to find. Oh well.

The gait code is more problematic though. I used the code I wrote for #Tote HaD, but it doesn't seem to be behaving exactly as I wanted. I'm still figuring out what is wrong -- it's probably something trivial like a reversed angle somewhere or a leg going out of range -- but no success yet.

You can see the current status on the movie:

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