I recently built up a hexapod walker robot that uses three servos. I suspect that it is quite similar to the Parallax
hexapod "Victor". I saw this on their web page and thought to myself, I wonder how they did that? So I went home and
designed one. Mine also uses a Parallax Basic Stamp I for its brains, and let me tell you, its all this controller can do
just to make the bug walk! Walking is MUCH more complex than just rolling! My web page has much more detail.
Latest Journal Entry
The Eyes 11 Nov 2000
The IR proximity detector works very well, even in a brightly lit "noisy" environment. The PIC pinout is the same as the DPRG board expects so you can plug it right in there. Instead of modulating the IR LED for 600us and then looking for a detection, I now look for a detection after every on/off cycle of an IR LED and count the number of hits that I get. I also look during the 'off' cycle when none of the IR LEDs are on and count the number of false hits that I get there. If I get more good hits than false hits then I say its a true detection. I then increment a counter as a sort of timer, when it passes a certain threshold, I notify a hit. At this time I check to make sure that a minimum number of good hits has been attained. At the same time I keep track via another time-out counter of noise hits. When this counter passes a certain threshold it then removes any detection that has been set. I fiddled a lot with the various threshold values for minimum number of good hits, time-out values and divisors for updating the false hit counts, and finally settled on the ones that currently used. I'm calling it a success and moving on to other projects!
I recently built up a hexapod walker robot that uses three servos. I suspect that it is quite similar to the Parallax
hexapod "Victor". I saw this on their web page and thought to myself, I wonder how they did that? So I went home and
designed one. Mine also uses a Parallax Basic Stamp I for its brains, and let me tell you, its all this controller can do
just to make the bug walk! Walking is MUCH more complex than just rolling! My web page has much more detail.
The IR proximity detector works very well, even in a brightly lit "noisy" environment. The PIC pinout is the same as the DPRG board expects so you can plug it right in there. Instead of modulating the IR LED for 600us and then looking for a detection, I now look for a detection after every on/off cycle of an IR LED and count the number of hits that I get. I also look during the 'off' cycle when none of the IR LEDs are on and count the number of false hits that I get there. If I get more good hits than false hits then I say its a true detection. I then increment a counter as a sort of timer, when it passes a certain threshold, I notify a hit. At this time I check to make sure that a minimum number of good hits has been attained. At the same time I keep track via another time-out counter of noise hits. When this counter passes a certain threshold it then removes any detection that has been set. I fiddled a lot with the various threshold values for minimum number of good hits, time-out values and divisors for updating the false hit counts, and finally settled on the ones that currently used. I'm calling it a success and moving on to other projects!