L'Hexapod

L'Hexapod: The servos are twitching

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. My package from Cool Components arrived this morning. My choice of prototyping equipment was quickly validated when I plugged together the Arduino and the Pololu servo controller board, plugged in the servos and servo power supply, connected the lot to the pc via a usb cable and had three servos twitching back and forth under the control of the Arduino is no time.

L'Hexapod: Pulse width modulation for servo position control

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. First some basics: servo motors are what I’ll be using to provide movement for the robot. Each leg will consist of at least three servo motors (1 at the knee and two at the hip). As you’ll see from the wikipedia link above, servo motors are generally controlled by pulse width modulation.

L'Hexapod: Useful links and suppliers

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. So far most of my more interesting components have been purchased from Cool Components mainly because they’re UK based and they stocked stuff I was interested in. I found them via SparkFun which is a treasure trove of fun; unfortunately I can’t find UK distributors for much of the stuff they have available and at present I’m trying to avoid buying bits and pieces for this project from the US as the shipping is often more expensive than the order.

L'Hexapod: Servos with status feedback

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. I saw these Dynamixel DX servos mentioned on Trossen Robotics this morning, see here. They’re interesting because they have a richer interface than the normal hobby servos that I’ve been looking at and they provide a multidrop RS485 interface so that you can chain multiple servos together and control them individually via a single line.

L'Hexapod: Micromagic systems

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Micromagic systems do robotics and animatronics for the film and tv industry and have quite a nice selection of hexapod robots. It’s especially interesting to see the evolution of their robots here. Their latest stuff is very impressive and puts into perspective how much I have to learn…

L'Hexapod: A-pod, an ant inspired hexapod

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. This is the kind of thing that I mean when I say ‘hexapod robot’. I particularly like the head and mandibles. More details can be found here: http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=2762 and here: http://blog.trossenrobotics.com/index.php/2009/03/17/a-pod-a-robot-ants-tale/

L'Hexapod: Welcome

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Hi, my name is Len Holgate and this is a blog about my new project to design and build a hexapod robot; a mechanical vehicle that walks on six legs… By day I design and build high performance TCP and UDP servers for the Windows platform, my C++ technical blog is here: www.