CategoryProjects

In the last post I covered improvements in the hardware side of Tinymovr R3.1 that resulted in a minor revision R3.2. This post will go over improvements on the Tinymovr firmware performed in the past couple months.  CAN Bus Protocol Implementation of CAN communication is now complete, and Tinymovr is fully operable through CAN. In

In this post I wanted to focus on Tinymovr firmware improvements and plan out the next steps, however an unexpected glitch had me spending all my development time on it and thus the rest of the updates have been pushed back a bit. Last week I put together a “torture test” for Tinymovr with the

Tinymovr R3 boards have recently arrived from China and I’ve been busy testing and improving things all over. Bottom line, they perform very well so far! The new MA702 encoder really makes a difference as angular position tracking is now super responsive and able to handle even the most vigorous accelerations. Due to the improved

I must admit that I’ve neglected this blog for a while, as it has been almost six months since I wrote a new post. On the other hand, I have been very busy with the development of a brushless motor controller for robotics: Tinymovr, as well as an associated quadruped robot design. For the past

Two years ago I made the unfortunate mistake of pledging for the Obsidian 3D printer campaign on Kickstarter. It turned out to be a really lousy investment, seeing that as of this point, more than two years later, nothing has been delivered and no real prospect of delivery of any sort of product is in

In several previous posts on this blog we went through the design/learning of control policies for virtual inverted pendulum robots in digital simulation. In this post we are going to discuss the design and building of a real-life inverted pendulum robot. While inverted pendulum is a very common theme in robotics, this particular design has

Brushless motors are changing the landscape in robotics. Coupled with precise closed-loop control, they are able to deliver excellent power to weight ratio but most importantly, they are transparent in the sense that external forces acting on the mechanism are reflected on the motor and vice versa. This leads to mechanisms that are actively compliant,

This is the third and final part of a post series on the design of a low-cost, 8-DOF quadruped robot using cheap servo motors. The first post in the series dealt with the assembly and testing of a single leg module. The second post discussed the integration of four individual leg modules to make the

This is the second part of a post series on the design, manufacturing and software design of a low cost quadruped robot using cheap servos closed-loop control and force-sensing resistors for ground force feedback. The first post focused on the design of the quadruped leg, which is the most essential hardware part of the robot.