Hexapod Robot Kinematics - part 3 (Espressif Dynamixel driver)
A couple of years ago, I built this Dynamixel powered Hexapod. It sports 18 AX-12A servos and a custom controller board of my own design. It looks impressive, but it lacks proper kinematics firmware.
I have to admit that I underestimated the complexity of robotics. Building a robot is easy. Making it behave the way you want is a bit more difficult.
In order to properly learn the fundamentals of kinematics for this system, I decided to create a simple hexapod simulator. This allows me to play around with topology, forward and inverse kinematics, various gaits and gait transitions.
I'm currently running the simulator under Windows and MacOS, but I am planning to also compile it for Raspberry Pi, which I in turn can use as a more generic robot controller.
This is the third part of the series, where test my dynamxiel2arduino "port" - creatively named "dynamixel2espressif"
This is basically just the dynamxiel2arduino robotis library with a custom port handler making it easy to use with the espressif/FreeRTOS framework.
I have uploaded the component to the ESP Component Registry and also made it available from GitHub.
https://components.espressif.com/comp...
https://github.com/hansj66/dynamixel2...
(From time to time, I also publish project updates on Hackaday.io: https://hackaday.io/project/195749-np...)