Week of 12/15 - 12/19

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 code in a library for the servo microcontroller that I was using. This code worked, but I had to adapt it so it would start using my instead. Eventually, I got this to work, and now the leg can move between two positions very cleanly. I also created a base stepping movement/animation in order to start showing how it will look in the future.

Next, though, I needed multiple legs to start making the leg animation work for different angles, as well as making the hip rotate. In order to do this, though, I needed to have a new frame since my old frame, made of acrylic, wouldn't work since the acrylic is too thick and it's also much heavier than the aluminum. When I cut out the aluminum frame, the aluminum pieces together were a lot lighter and also much thinner than the acrylic, which will be very helpful in making the full design.

On Thursday, I was able to use the water jet to cut my frame. The water jet took a bit of getting used to since I hadn't used it in a while, and it seemed to work the first time I used it to cut the frame. But the holes were a little bit off, which was partially due to my design being pretty thin where the holes were being cut. And also, one of the boxes for where the servo is supposed to go was not fully cut out, so I had to bend those pieces out. I re-cut the bottom and top of the frame, and those came out a lot better, and I was able to deburr some of the holes and edges in order to make it cleaner.

At the end of the day, I just started to assemble everything, but then I realized that one of the screw holes wasn't fully screwed through, so I'll have to drill this myself. Other than that, it should be working. I will be able to put my first leg into the frame on Friday.