Week of 1/12 - 1/16

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 two ESP32s: one in the controller and another on the robot itself. They would communicate with the server 2040 via I2C communication. I got some code to try and connect the ESP and the server 2040 to see if I could send anything from them. Because this is what I would need to do to send variables over. But I wasn't able to get it to work with the I2C connector, so I moved on to working on the legs.

I put all of the parts I needed for one leg into one print, and I tried to print it out at the end of the day so it wouldn't take up the printer for a long time. Unfortunately, this ended up making the print spaghettify because I had a lot of little pins I needed to print out to connect the foot part of the leg, and they weren't cooperating with me. So I had to take those out, but after that, I luckily did the print worked fine.

I then spent a lot of time putting together the second leg. Each part needs to be screwed in, and so the motors also have to be unscrewed on the bottom for two of them. This makes this process pretty long and tedious, so it took me a good part of the week to do just this. Then one of the motors wasn't working, and I figured out later that this was just because the wire I was using was bad. But I spent a while trying to troubleshoot that, but eventually I got two legs working really good.

I then wanted to get the third leg working as well, so I printed that out and assembled it. I had no issues when assembling it since I've gotten pretty good at it by now. I then modified the code so that it would work with 9 server motors, which is half of what I need in the end. I can probably make them move separately, but I want to wait until I have 4 legs so that it won't fall over if I try to move it. It can stand up now, and it actually works synchronously.