Over the last couple of weeks I've made this small hexapod. The chassis and legs are made from laser cut acryl. At the moment I'm using 12 micro 9G servos. But I'm planning to replace them with MG90 metal gear servos. The servos are controlled by a board that I have designed my self. It has an ATmega328P-PU and a 3A 5V switch mode regulator (LM2576). So this board controls and powers the 12 servos. The second board has another ATmega328P-PU which runs at 3.3V 8MHz. This board handles the communication, it has a header for a 2.4GHz nRF24L01+ module. The 2 ATmegas communicate which each other over the I2C bus. I made a logic level converter to convert the signals to the correct voltage. I've also fitted a third PCB, this one has several screw terminals to distribute the power from the Lipo to the other boards. It is fitted with a resistor divider so I can monitor the voltage of the 2S Lipo. There are also 3 NPN transistors on the board which control 4 RGB leds on the bottom of the chassis. The transistors are controlled by 3 PWM pins.
For the moment I have written a sketch to remote control it using the wireless nRF24L01 modules. Some time ago I made a remote control based on an Arduino Uno, joystick shield and a nRF24L01 module.
I have not added any sensors to the hexapod yet. That is the next step. I will add an ultrasonic sensor so it can walk around autonomously.
Here is a video of it walking around:
cool with those lights, Well done!
Spent some more time working on my hexapod. I received a free EL-shield from Seeedstudio in their monthly give-away, so I added some EL-wire to my hexapod. I also changed all the servos, I'm now using 12 MG90 servos. I think there is some incompatibility between the servo library and the wire (I2C) and software serial library. When I include the wire or software serial library in my code my servos twitch. I'm now using hardware serial to communicate between the 2 ATmega328's.
Coool -
I started to learn this week. I hope that someday I make something like that haha
Ah, The noise of the legs dragging is cool.