Back in 2009 I started playing around with embedded assembly language on simple hardware with the intention of building a robot spider. This was hosted on a separate website, L’Hexapod.com It was a lot of fun but once my children came along the project took up too much time for me to focus on it.
Back in 2010 I thought that the birth of my first son, Scott, would be just a small blip in my journey into robotics but, looking back, it seems to have been the end of that chapter.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
Back in 2010 I thought that the birth of my first son, Scott, would be just a small blip in my journey into robotics but, looking back, it seems to have been the end of that chapter. Of course, raising children takes time, and Scott was just the first; he was followed shortly after by Max and if I thought assembly and robotics was complex to learn it’s nothing compared to raising kids!
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
I’ve been very busy with other things just recently and so I haven’t been able to spend much time on this project. Work has been busy as I’m working towards a new release of my code and my son Scott was born on 25th January.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
The simple servo sequencer that I’ve been working on has exposed a bug in the servo controller firmware. The bug is due to stack corruption during movement completion notifications, so it only happens if you use the ‘multi-move’ commands or the delay move command.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
Once the servo controller code was feature complete I switched to looking at the hardware side of things and thinking about the next stage, the servo sequencing.
From a hardware point of view I had several things to work on.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
Whilst playing around with my servo controller I realised that the power used by a servo goes up considerably when it’s under heavy load (such as when it’s pressing against the table and still trying to move). I can, potentially, get an idea of this load by measuring the current that each servo is using and using this feedback somehow.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
I decided to treat myself to an early christmas present and bought a 60W temperature controlled soldering station (a ZD-916 which I got from Maplin). All I can say is WOW. Suddenly I can solder neatly rather than making a smeary mess.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
This is the AVR Studio project and assembly language source code files for the latest version (v7.0) of my 64 channel serial servo controller.
This is the latest version of the ATMega168 version of the code which includes all of the new servo commands that I wrote about here including the multi-move command and the unit tests that I spoke of here.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
The latest version of the serial servo controller is now fully operational (I’ll upload the source code shortly). There are still some bugs that I’m finding but the work I put in to getting the unit tests in place makes fixing these bugs pretty straight forward.
Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
It’s taken me almost a month but I’m finally back to working on integrating the multiple servo move command into the rest of the code. Well, the integration was done long ago, unfortunately the debugging was the bit that was taking up my time.
