L'Hexapod: Moving forward
This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
Due to work pressure and then holidays and then more work pressure I had to take a break from the servo controller for a couple of weeks. Most of the code changes that I had previously been discussing have been implemented and I’m now in the process of testing an ATMega168 version of the 64 channel servo controller complete with new style commands! Since this version of the servo controller uses a custom serial protocol and since it can send unsolicited serial responses back to its controller I needed to write a new PC based control program to test it with. That’s now operational and I’ve been testing the delayed moves and their corresponding asynchronous move completion notifications. Once I’m happy with that I need to design and write the final piece of code which will interface between the new serial protocol and the servo control data update code… I’ve already implemented the move completion notifications, servo position query, servo stop and stop all servos commands so the design of the data structures and synchronisation details have been validated. Once that’s done and working on the 168 I may see if I can squeeze an 8 channel version of this new code back onto the ATTiny2313.
