![\"IMG_20160508_192518\"](\"http:\/\/projecthexapod.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/IMG_20160508_192518-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPhysical robot is mostly done<\/strong><\/p>\n Stompy is built! \u00a0There are six legs, a chassis, a roll cage, and an engine. \u00a0The engine runs and powers the hydraulics. \u00a0All of the hydraulics are hooked up and working properly.<\/p>\n There is still some work left to be done on the electronics. \u00a0All six legs have a sealed Leg Controller enclosure with a Beaglebone Black inside. \u00a0The Beaglebones have custom perf board capes. \u00a0Each cape carries\u00a0a Dual MC33926<\/a> Motor Controller, which can drive four\u00a0PWM channels to control two pistons. \u00a0The current plan is to drive the Knee and Thigh joints with those two channels, and add three more boxes located on the chassis to drive the Thigh joints.<\/p>\n All of the Leg Controller boxes are wired up to the network switch. \u00a0We can plug a laptop into the switch and talk to all the Beaglebones in the legs.<\/p>\n The Beaglebones don’t have software to do closed loop control yet, but we can SSH in and directly set the PWM outputs to move the Knee and Thigh joints.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Software<\/strong><\/p>\n Most of our activity right now is focused on software. \u00a0We recently decided to run our code in ROS and have been spending a lot of time getting the ROS ecosystem up and running.<\/p>\n We have a SDF file that Brett Graham put together a little while back. \u00a0He even linked in the Solidworks files for the robot, so we’ll be able to simulate a realistic model of Stompy in Gazebo.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Current Tasks<\/strong><\/p>\n Seth Woodworth and Robin Garner have been working on using Vagrant and Ansible to automate building virtual environments. \u00a0The goal is to be able to repeatably spin up a virtual machine with the ROS environment set up that we can use for development. \u00a0Hopefully we will be able to use\u00a0the same Ansible setup to deploy directly to the Beaglebones on the robot.<\/p>\n Spark is working on getting a launcher script to run nodes on different machines across a network.<\/p>\n Chris Stokes has been investigating the SeeedStudio Motor Bridge Cape<\/a> as a new option for a motor controller cape. \u00a0If we switched over to it, it would replace the custom perf board capes as well as the\u00a0MC33926<\/a>\u00a0motor controllers. \u00a0This option would allow us to control all three leg joints from the Leg Controller BeagleBone. \u00a0There are pros and cons to running all three leg joints from the Leg Controller, but overall it’s probably preferable to do it if we can.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here are some more photos, and a video showing the constructed robot.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>