Matt's Engineering Blog

This week, I didn't really have much to work on since I was still waiting on the new microcontroller for the servos, which broke last week. I still had a couple of other things to work on for my robot, though, so I primarily did that this week. One of those things was wire management, which, after attaching all 18 wires, so they were about last week, I realized I was severely lacking in. In order to fix the wire management issue, I had to first make the foot wires longer sinc

at the start of this week, I was mainly focused on getting all the legs working synchronously. I was having a bit of an issue because on the board, pins 1 and 2 were synced up with 17 and 18. So, I had to have them do the same exact thing at the same exact time, or else nothing would work. I did manage to get the robot to go up and down though, which is really nice. And I only had one part of the leg missing because I needed to solder those wires still. I saw the wires, and I

This week, I primarily worked on assembling my hexapod. I worked on getting the 5th leg on on Wednesday since I had been able to print it over the weekend. This was pretty tedious and took a while, so I don't have much to write about since I was basically doing this for the entire time. On Thursday, I assembled the 6th leg, but I didn’t manage to finish it, so I will continue working on it on Friday. One of the motors was broken, so I had to replace it, which is why I didn’t

This week I began by making my hexapod work with four legs, and I wanted to get it to work with all of them at the same time. I had been powering it with a USBC coord, but it was only able to accept 3A from there, and it was not enough to drive all 12 motors at once. I then connected external power and it was able to move with all 4 at the same time. I then started working on making a walking patter, but because I only have 4 legs it is a lot harder since there is not enough

this week I was working on my hexapod again and I got a lot done regarding the communication and also getting more of the legs on since I only had one before. I spent a lot of time trying to get the servo controller to communicate with an ESP32, which would be in a controller where there are two joysticks. So, I can have up-down, left-right, forward-back, and also spinning. I reviewed several guides and found that the most effective approach to achieve my goal was to utilize

At the start of this week, I was trying to figure out how I should control my hexapod robot, and my shop teacher suggested using an esp32. Ive never used an esp32 before, so I was trying to figure out how to use one, but i wasnt getting very far. I think I looked at like 4 guides, but none of them worked, and they all told me different things. I was kinda fed up with trying to figure out the esp 32, so I decided to try and solve another problem that I realized existed. When I

A lot of this week was mainly me working on my code to get my leg working. This took me Monday through Wednesday, so that's primarily what I was focusing on, but I got a lot of work done those days. I wanted to make it so that when it moves to a certain position, it would move smoothly rather than just moving the motors once, but rather taking multiple steps in order to do so. And this would also reduce servo overshoot if it goes too far. The way I solved this was by using co

This week, I got a lot done on my leg design, as well as assembling and testing my leg. Firstly, I wanted to redesign a couple of parts since I didn't really like how I made them before. So I spent some time redesigning my foot part of the leg so that the holes were more evenly spaced and there wasn't any weird geometry going on. I also had to change a couple of sizes to make the motor fit better, and I removed one part that made it so the wire wouldn't fit. When I printed it