L'Hexapod: I seem to have developed something remarkably similar to the SSC 32

Previously published

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.

I was looking for information to help me decide which servos to buy for the legs; wondering about torque and cost and whatever when I followed a link to the Lynxmotion site and came across the documentation for their SSC 32 servo controller. Although I’d looked at their PC based control software that drives this servo controller I hadn’t seen the docs for the controller itself. It seems that it has most of the features that my controller has, including the ‘move multiple servos so that they get to the end at the same time’ command that I’m working on now. They don’t have the asynchronous move completion notifications that I have and I can see those being really useful for sequencing moves based without the need for timing loops (the completion of one set of moves triggering a state change which causes a new set of moves). They also don’t have a ‘stop!’ command that can stop a ‘delayed move’ mid stride and that’s also something that I think will be really useful; especially once I have sensors working…

Their docs include a schematic which shows that they’re doing things in a pretty similar style to the way that I decided to do things; multiple mux chips and an ATMega168 at the heart of it all. I guess that their mux chips are active low, as they seem to have pull up resistors on them… It’s quite nice to come across this now and to see that I’ve managed to get this far on my own :)