Matt's Engineering Blog

this week I was only here for two days, so I didn't get a ton done, but I did start wrapping things up with the hexapod project since I won't be able to completely finish it with the days that we have left in shop. I firstly took all the code from the project and put it on my GitHub account since I hadn't done that before. So now I have all the mostly important files in there that someone would need if they were to try to finish my project in the future. I also made sure all

This week, I started out by installing the rest of the standoffs that I hadn't put on yet. There were only six that I needed to attach, but they helped because three of the legs were wobbling a bit. With these attached, all the motors were secure, and now the legs don't move when I don't want them to. After that was done, I then started to get to work on making it so the walking gait would move straight instead of sideways a little bit. I mapped out all the points that a leg

I started off this week by making half of the foot and cap molds, and they came out really well, actually. I had extra silicone when I poured them into the molds. So I decided to try to put the molds themselves into the silicone so that they would always have an excess of silicone and could remove air bubbles from it. And this seemed to work because there are no noticeable air bubbles besides very small ones, but I don't think those will matter in the grand scheme of things.

This week, I finally got all eighteen of the servo motors working with the new function, which is a big step in getting the robot to be complete. I did run into a few issues, though, especially with calibration and making sure that the servo cluster function actually worked as intended, since it was going from -1 to 1 instead of the previous 0 to 1 values I had before. When I attached the motors to the 3D print, I had a bit of an issue since the servo horns had these gears on

This week, I started by changing around the mold that I had previously made, and changed it to better fit the end of the leg. I then printed it out, which came out well, and then I mixed and poured in the resin. I tried to make sure each surface was coated before clamping the pieces together, since I wanted to try and remove any air bubbles that could appear if the silicone wasn't fully distributed. This ended up still happening, though, as a small bubble appeared in between

At the start of this week, I was finishing designing the cover part for the hexapod and scaling up to a size that looked best, but also fit the space where it needed to go. I designed it after a similar robot from a game I like, so I tried to make it look pretty accurate to the real thing. This led me to scale it to about 1.3 times the original size since it looked pretty weird when it was so small before. This is the robot I modeled it after With the legs in place, the cover

This week, I was trying to use the 8-pin servo driver, but I think the creators purposely made it difficult to use because nothing I did worked. I started out by trying to find some kind of documentation on the pinouts, and I eventually found it, but it took a long time and was hidden in a random description. I also came across the issue that most of the time, it had info on the 16-pin board, which had the same name as the 8-pin one. Eventually, I managed to find some informa

This week, I was primarily looking at how to use the new servo controllers as well as soldering them. We only had two days to work so far this week, so I was primarily looking at how I could use it to connect to the ESP32 and how I would do that. And then also soldering the pins onto it since it didn't come pre-assembled. I also have two more boards that I'm going to need since I have 18 motors total, but each board only holds 8, so I'll need 3. But I decided not to solder th