Tag Archives: hexapod

Hexapods

fixing the hexarideablepod shaft slipping issue

I’ve had this recurring problem where the set screws on hexarideablepod prevent the aluminum torque transmission bar from slipping radially on the shaft, but have issues preventing it from slipping axially.
Today I learned today courtesy of Mars, regarding ways to prevent axial slippage:
  • Retaining rings (clips, e-clips, c-clips, circlips) are more for axial alignment, not very load-bearing
    • E-clips are “Side-Mount External Retaining Rings” 
    • the middle part of the E isn’t supposed to go inside a keyway.
      Yea, that retaining ring I put on earlier (sticking the middle part in the keyway and dremeling an imprecise groove for the other “ear” parts of the e) wasn’t actually being that useful, although it did seem to help. 
  • Cotter pin + washer is a good solution, 
    • can probably take a hand drill even and drill a small diameter hole through the shaft
  • Even a small divot instead of a flat channel will go a long way to helping the set screws not slip around the shaft
  • I could mount a steel plate to my aluminum linkage and weld the linkage permanently to the motor shaft steel, 
And then finally the “duh” easiest solution, since I’m only concerned about inward slippage, is make a PVC standoff. 
This is super exciting, since I can finish this in 15 minutes (wellllll. If our bandsaw wasn’t out of service…. a long story… oh MITERS) and then the hexarideablepod will be mostly mechanically robust.
The electricals will be a piece of cake because I found drill triggers that are 24V 16A and make me happier than my 15V triggers. (yea, yea, I should make my own dumb motor controllers, but the packaging is just so convenient. People will even sit on turned-off hexarideablepod and play with the triggers just because). So I just need to rewire that, and make a more permanent battery mounting solution, and I’m all set.
Oh, and find another tennis ball, I lost one of my floor protectors.
Also add some 12V rgb LED strip lighting.
Next for NYC Maker Faire: 
  • hexadancingpod
    • model & print new body
    • buy new pololu serial servo controller because I am too lazy to make my own
    • build battery pack
    • buy accelerometer and ultrasound (or find)
    • write software
  • nyancat singing poptart
    • arduino + speaker
    • arduino + piezo
    • attiny + piezo -> buy surfacemount attiny’s, scrounge up piezos (get digikey account)
  • vending machine
    • add buttons
    • if time, add ir led sensors
    • ??? payment ???
  • pov poi
    • buy rgb LEDs
    • route board
    • packaging?
Other notes:

My shaft measured about 43/64” (672 mil) , so it seems like the standard given motor shaft diameters, in this case 3/4” (725 mil), is larger than the actual shaft size (? check this with someone).

========
Some notes I was taking:


Common ways of preventing axial slippage in the inward direction:
  • cotter pin
    • requires drilling a thin hole all the way through the motor shaft
  • retaining ring http://www.mcmaster.com/#retaining-rings/=jcg38v
    • requires machining a precise groove all around the motor shaft
    • which means if I lamely do it with a dremel (how do people do it anyway? build a fixture with a cutting edge, apply power to the motor, in a temporary lathe sort of way?) then the retaining ring isn’t going to be very strong (it’ll pop out).
    • I’m not sure about installing it since I have keyways on both sides of the shaft so it’s hard to not have one of the ends of the “e” dig into a keyway instead of a groove.
Uncategorized

emergency motor controller fail

just an update to say no, i did not successfully make a motor controller in 48 hours 🙂
(see previous post for schematic: http://www.orangenarwhals.com/?p=152)
what was it? a 6.131 final project / motor controller for hexarideablepod (derived off of an instructables):

which works, but uses an arduino and two victor speed controllers — total overkill. also, terrible UI: it uses a hard to reach switch for fwd/bwd and foot pedals, which little kids have issues reaching even with the awesome!adjustable-car-seat.

block diagrams! ewww.

https://github.com/nouyang/hexapodtroller for the eagle sch/brd. You can see terrible routing here:

power board (4 FETs to make a full H-bridge)
sig board — attiny44 and four FET drivers (21844s). also, chain voltage regulators from 24v battery to 15v for drivers to 5v for attiny logic.

speed routing and my inexperience led to use of 24 zero ohm resistors and I still used a jumper 🙂

hai zero ohm resistor friends
If you look closely, you can see some of the trace fails (compare IRL to board layout) which were probably due to too high error allowances when the fab module was creating the roland modela machine code. See: pins 8 and 9 on the top right side of the topmost IC, the attiny44. They’re connected on the board but not on the schematic. I used eagle’s erc/drc and it didn’t point out a warning so I’m going to assume it was mill code generation settings, not limits of mill capability.
I discovered how useful eagle layers are, even in the interface is terribly clunky.

I create zero-ohm resistors a dumb way that actually turns out to be helpful when populating a lot of them. Since they each have an air wire, I can set air wires to a nice contrasting color and see where they all are:

Another note, I milled out the moles CNC-ly too using GIMP to get the traces I needed, but :/ milled them out too small and had difficulty getting the 3.5mm spacing power connectors to go through the board — had to carefully use a vise.

This is what the final half-populated boards looked like:

Hexapods

Summer: Rideable hexapod, check

teaser pic

Ah, where’ve I been all summer?

Having lots of fun, actually, but I’ve been hiding in my codefail cave and then I went and lost my camera.

Poof, hundreds of meticulous documentation pictures. Serves me right for not documenting as I go along / backing up my pictures.

Above is a pic of hexapod before I added the foot controls. Which are now being demoted in favor of joystick controls. But I did finish it in time for dorm rush / hall rush and gave lots of froshlings rides! And discovered some serious issues 🙂

Hexarideablepod is based off of a very detailed instructables called Hexabot. I’m slightly embarrassed by this fact, for whatever reason, and even though hexarideablepod only deserves my love (it already has my blood, sweat, and tears…)

Yea, that’s a racecar seat that my fellow MITERSians helped me recycle from an old unfinished vehicle 🙂