Debugging

Published on 2017-01-29 in D1 Mini Tote.

I have the little guy assembled (I stole the legs from my first Tote prototype), and it works quite well. However, software is the hard part.

First I had to remap the servos in my servo controller firmware to make them agree with what’s written on the PCB – that should make it much easier to debug everything in the future. I also wrote the Python side of the communication with the servos, and there I had my first problem – when sending the servo positions too fast one after the other, I get bus errors. For now I just catch them and retry, but I suspect I will need to increase the clock stretching timeout.\

Second, the Python code for Inverse kinematics – I used the original code that I have written years ago for µKubik quadruped robot , and it seems to work without problems. Yay. Except for some stupid mistakes I made, like multiplying everything by 0, which of course took me hours to find. Oh well.

The gait code is more problematic though. I used the code I wrote for Tote HaD , but it doesn’t seem to be behaving exactly as I wanted. I’m still figuring out what is wrong – it’s probably something trivial like a reversed angle somewhere or a leg going out of range – but no success yet.

You can see the current status on the movie: