Matt's Engineering Blog

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

This week, I got a ton of work done on my design. Firstly, I worked on the foot design, which is the last part of the leg. I wanted to make it lightweight since it's the longest piece I have, so I made holes along it. I also added in a spot for screws at the bottom, since I am connecting both halves with pins, but they are not foolproof, and the pieces can still fall apart, so I wanted the extra reinforcement. I went through a couple of different designs, but I ended up with

This week, I was primarily focused on designing and making prototypes from the physical aspect of my project. I first wanted to start with the base, since I would need that first anyway, and I wanted to get it done before I started working on the arms. I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning it, but in the end, I think it turned out well. I then cut it out using acrylic, and I want to end up making it out of aluminum for the finished thing. The servo motors I'm using

This week, I was mostly working on figuring out inverse kinematics. The ideas themselves aren't too difficult since it's mainly just trigonometry, but I wanted to put it into Desmos so I could have an actual visual representation. This is important since it will allow me to input any coordinate on an XYZ plane, and the equations will find the angles I need to set the motors to in order to achieve this. I spent a lot of the week looking at ways other people have done it, but I