A user of my free server framework code has reported an error and supplied a fix. The problem is that he’s been having connections closing and returning ERROR_CONNECTION_ABORTED and the free code doesn’t handle this situation very well and this was causing his I/O threads to terminate and leaving him with an unresponsive server. Interestingly I’ve never had this problem reported before and haven’t been able to duplicate the issue but I thought it would be useful to publish the fix in case anyone else comes across the problem.

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 spent a little time at the weekend putting together my three servos into a prototype leg. The idea is that this very quick and very dirty little experiment should give me some more avenues to explore; and something to show people.

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.

A lot of the custom development work that we do for our customers can be classified as developing ‘custom application servers’. Development for these kinds of servers usually requires that we design a wire-protocol for communications between the clients and the server, implement a server that either does everything that the customer requires or allows them to easily plug in their business logic and provide a client side library (or two) that makes it easy for the customer to write clients for the server.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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/

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.