Is the CAD?

Great success! I learned CAD. Or rather Amy worked through the point I kept getting stuck on (a particular series of mates for the hexapod leg assembly), and then it was fairly easy sailing from there. Yay 🙂

not sure why it has 5 legs, might’ve hidden one when I screenshot’d

In other news, I didn’t make much headway on the pololu issue where something about my setup using Arduino + Pololu Mini Maestro is off (Dane showed me how to check with the multimeter to verify that the voltage was dropping to zero, aka symptoms of current limiting). I even took twenty minutes to wire everything to the original Arduino Nano (+ 2.007 carrier board) state, and verified that it did sound much… happier (yay the sound of 18 bloodthirsty happy servos =]). But I did read up more on serial and code, which was fun and hurt my head.

new robot brainz: Pololu Mini Maestro + Arduino

[Update, Jun 24 2010]: well now it actually works. see post: http://www.orangenarwhals.com/?p=197

My hardware:
Pololu Mini Maestro (24 ch serial RC controller)
Arduino Nano
1 servo
Some male header pins
A battery
A 2.007 Nano Carrier Board, which gives me easy access to the Arduino pins and a 5V supply
An 8V battery pack
Ubuntu 10.10 on my hp 2140 mini netbook

Steps:
Apply Powerz to Pololu and servos

TX/RX if needed
http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J40/7.c
specifically
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Board
http:// www.pololu.com/docs/0J40/1.b 

Apply codez
http://forum.pololu.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3944

(put servo on pololu ch 0)