L'Hexapod
Back in 2009 I started playing around with embedded assembly language on simple hardware with the intention of building a robot spider. This was hosted on a separate website, L’Hexapod.com It was a lot of fun but once my children came along the project took up too much time for me to focus on it.
Back in 2010 I thought that the birth of my first son, Scott, would be just a small blip in my journey into robotics but, looking back, it seems to have been the end of that chapter. Of course, raising children takes time, and Scott was just the first; he was followed shortly after by Max and if I thought assembly and robotics was complex to learn it’s nothing compared to raising kids! :)
At the time, I was also looking to learn something new to play around with that was separate from my work. I was expecting to have to go and get a ‘real’ job and my INTJ personality type needed some reassurance that when I was working for a company that would want to own all of my programming output I’d have something I could do that wasn’t in any way related to something they’d want. Seems silly now.
I never did need to get a real job back in 2010 and have continued with my consultancy business. The assembly stuff was fun and I’d love to get back to it, but now I seem to be spending most of my spare time painting Warhammer figures for my boys (and myself) and then battling it out with them on the tabletop.
I’m now in the process of decomissioning the L’Hexapod site and have started by merging the content into this blog under the L’Hexapod main category. Next up will be redirects from the original site and then, after a while, that site will go away. Hopefully this means that the tiny number of people that find this stuff useful will still be able to find it.
Here’s a list of all the content from the old site with links to the repubished pages.
- Welcome
- A-pod, an ant inspired hexapod
- Micromagic systems
- Servos with status feedback
- Useful links and suppliers
- Pulse width modulation for servo position control
- The servos are twitching
- Prototype leg v0.1
- Thoughts on the proto leg
- First steps in embedded programming; first build the hardware…
- More thoughts on the proto leg
- Once more with feeling
- Books for programming an AVR micro
- The servo controller problems weren’t power supply noise…
- Arduino multiple serial disappointment
- I may have been a little harsh…
- AVR Studio 4
- Atmel ATtiny2313 Servo Controller v0.1
- CD74HCT238E
- Atmel ATtiny2313 Servo Controller v0.1 - source code
- 64 channel servo controller…
- Atmel ATtiny2313 Servo Controller v0.2 - source code
- Fundamental design flaw in the servo controller code
- Linkfest…
- Fabrication…
- Chiara hexapod
- Redesigning the servo controller firmware
- A timer driven PWM servo controller
- A timer driven PWM servo controller - part 2
- A timer driven PWM servo controller - part 3
- A timer driven PWM servo controller - part 4
- ATTiny2313 24 channel servo controller schematic
- Tweaking the servo controller
- What’s next?
- Extending the servo controller
- All the problems of multi-threading without the threads
- Asynchronous serial responses
- Registers, stack usage and timing
- And then switch to the ATMega168…
- Prototype fabrication
- Moving forward
- New servo controller commands
- ATMega168 64 channel servo controller
- Storing data in the eeprom of an ATMega168
- I seem to have developed something remarkably similar to the SSC 32
- Serial communications issues
- Flow control is the key?
- New design please…
- Almost there….
- Moving multiple servos at once
- After the servo controller
- Integrating the multi-move command
- Unit testing AVR assembly language
- Repeatable Unit Testing with AVR Assembler and AVR Studio
- Testing, Testing…
- Relative branch out of reach
- ChipHacker.com
- Testing backwards
- Back to JIT testing
- ATMega168 64 channel servo controller with ‘advanced’ servo commands
- New soldering iron…
- Sensing servo torque
- Where are we?
- Bug in v7.0 of the servo controller firmware
- Delays…
- More than just a delay, it seems…