Elephants and Servos
This week sees the release of Diyode magazine #26. I’ve been working on a project for them for a few weeks now and it’s been split up into 3 parts. The first 2 are in this edition.
The main project is a 3D printed walking elephant. To hook up the servos I made a simple breakout board and Daniel took that and produce a beginners project to build the same thing on stripboard. A handly little project in its own right.
The brain of the robot is a FireBeetle ESP32 board that I got from Pimoroni. It’s a powerful microcontroller board with inbuilt Wifi. That allowed me to create a webAPI to control the motion, left, right, forward and stop. And then a simple web page could send messages to the API using AJAX calls when the user presses some buttons.
The elephant was printed using Silver Grey ABS from Rigid Ink
You’ll need to wait till next month for the code and build instructions as this month is all about printing the parts.
Also this week, I finished off testing the Trinamic Stepper Motor Driver this is a sophisticated chip that can use used in a motion controller mode i.e. you set the speed or position along with an acceleration graph and it moves to the desired location. It also has current sensing and can detect a stall condition and stop the motor. Finally the driver supports a quadrature encoder so it can tell where the motor is compaired to the desired steps and alert you if something is slipping.
Posted in: Projects
Tags: 3DPrinting
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
[…] several months of effort, the Walking Elephant project was finished and published in September. It was published in 2 parts with a further […]
[…] would need some kind of housing. I had some silver/grey filament left over from when I made the elephant so I styled a pyramid that would look a bit like an oversized stud and also hold some large red and […]