Balancing on One Leg

I modified Keith Code to operate the 12 degrees of freedom in the legs. I was playing around with the robot to find its stability when standing on one foot. I was successful on getting to shift and stand as you can see in the video. It became apparent that Keith's method of coding was not good for expanding, the code got very large and messy. I also had to do all the code heavy lifting by hand, this needed to be changed to be generated on the fly.

Torque ON and LED

After the success with Keith Code, I knew I needed to test my knowledge I gained to see if I actually learned how the communication was broken down. I used an example that was in the Dynamixel RX-28 manual, turn the Torque On/Off and turn the LED On/Off. I used Keith Code structure, and with some tinkering around I managed to make a successful communication of the functions. Here is the screen shot of the front panel (user interface) of the code and a video of the operation (my version of Hello World).

Mini-Hubo First moves with Keith's Code

The best way to start a LabVIEW program is to start from existing code. I knew that Keith Sevcik one of my colleagues from DASL made a basic communication with Dynamixels using LabVIEW. Keith's program was built for a specific reason actuating the 3 axes of the Gantry Pan, Tilt, and Yaw camera mount. I am also a very visual learner, so I dissected his code probing it to understand the the basics of Dynamixel communication. To find out more on the Dynamixel I wrote a post on it when I was in Korea Designing the ATLAS Humanoid. I ran my phone bill through the roof for January, picking Keith brain on the way it worked (Thanks Keith!) I created a basic Tutorial in layman's terms on how the 8 bit communication works and the Dynamixel control table. I guess the biggest challenge for me was understanding the CheckSUM and calculating the length. At the end of the communication string of characters, an area adds up the data verifying that the full length was received by the device. Also calculation of the length had a formula that counted the motors and another length parameter. I was coming up short when I tried to calculated it by hand, took me a while to wrap my head around this concept. These two points in mind pushed me in my future code revisions to make the code calculate these internally to allow for expandability and elimination of error.

~Keith's code gave me a Control that I could reference anytime I made new changes. His code worked first time with communication with the Dynamixel!

Lets Play Catch Up

I have let a bit of time pass from my last post, so let's give a few hints to the future topics that came about the last month.

• Mini-Hubo First moves with Keith's Code
• Torque on and LED
• Balancing on one Leg
• FitPC2 Arrived, Dr. T Frequents the Cube, with the High Ups
• The fall - and Burn out....
• The birth of the Gantry
• FitPC2 Running LabVIEW 2009!
• First Code Review
• Code rework, no more Local variables!
• Code Rev_01
• Academic Mini-Hubo Presentation
• Welcome a Girl to Engineering Day (Mini-Hubo Wears a Dress)
• Code Rev_02
• Final Code Review (Perfect)
• Code Rev_03 ( I'm a perfectionist)
• ARCS-10 Paper ( First Paper... not going to well) (Present)
• Mini-HUBO Mark2 Pre-CAM for DASL
• Developer Zone Documents - FitPC2 with LabVEIW, Dynamixel Sync Write (Future)
• Jeannie Falcon, Red Team, Verification!
• RJ leaves NI March 12th :(

Now that is a List!