Matt's Engineering Blog

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

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