Week of 11/10 - 11/14

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 didn't want to just copy someone elses design and be done with it so I tried to learn it myself. I figured out how to make it work for just the XY plane, and that wasnt too difficult, the hard part is taking that and adding in the Z axis.

I tried a multitude of ways to do this and looked at many guides. I think I am close to figuring it out, though, and it shouldn't be long before I have a working model. I have the angles neccesary; it's just a matter of figuring out how to make them work even when I rotate the arm.

This week, I was also looking at both servos and servo controllers. I found a servo controller that will probably work perfectly, since it has 18 ports, exactly how many servos I will need to make my hexapod. It also supports many different things, and has programmable LEDs which will help me if (when) I need to debug my code.

I was also looking at servo motors. While I would like to get powerful fast ones, those are pretty expensive, even more so if I need 18 of them. Because of this, I found these that someone else had used in their design, and they said there were no real issues except for a slight overshoot, which can be fixed with some friction washers.