hexapod-irl

Mithi’s Hexapod IRL

This is a “fork” of the original Bare-Minimum Hexapod Robot Simulator 2 that is modified to be able to control a real physical hexapod robot, among other things. Note: This uses the hexapod-kinematics-library for computations, replacing previous src/hexapod.

🚧 Work In Progress 🚧

❗❗🚜 🚧 👷 🏗️ (Underconstruction, use at your own risk! ) ❗❗🚜 🚧 👷 🏗️

Updates

• v0.2.0 - Replace PubNub with SocketIO. Based on my experiments, PubNub batches messages and isn’t “inrealtime” enough. Using SocketIO, the jankiness is significantly reduced.
• v0.1.0 - Use PubNub to send commands. Janky.

How to Use (v0.0.2)

1. Never built a hexapod robot before? The mithi/hexy repository is a great place to start! Includes the BOM!

2. Build your hexapod robot with an Arduino-compatible / Johnny-five compatible board. I personally used an Adafruit Metro Mini 328. Don’t forget to flash your board with the recommended standard firmata flavor (see also: Johnny Five Wiki: Getting Started)

3. Update your servo config in ./src/_SERVO_CONFIG.js. The Johnny Five documentation, Servo API page is your friend!

4. I personally use two pwm pins of my board and one PCA9685 to drive my eighteen mg996r servos. If you do the same, make sure you hook it up properly!

5. Inspect and modify the variables in ./src/_VAR_CONFIG.js as needed.

6. This is how the angle of each servo is transformed (function) based on my specific physical hexapod robot configuration. Modify this to suit your needs.

7. This is the bare minimum node script that will talk to your Arduino and the front-end web app / user interface. Modify this to suit your needs.

8. Open two terminal tabs and run the following:

$ npm install

# on one terminal tab, this builds and serves the react app
$ npm run prod:client

# on another terminal tab, this runs the johnny-five script
$ npm run run:server

Enjoy!