Spider Summary Report

The Spider Summary by mroxo7

Contribution of Team Members and Other Info

We hope to have the finished 3D printed parts within the next couple of days, in time for the presentation this Friday, the 13th. Since the spider is close to being completed we will display the contributions of each team member and the approximate total hours spent. The division of labor for this project was the following:
Chris Tiani-programming of spider, designing of spider in blender, blog post (16 hours)
Chris Beale-designing of spider in solidworks, blog posts, project summary report  (14 hours)
Mat Roxo-designing of spider in solidworks, blog posts, project summary report  (13 hours)
Devin Westmacott-designing of spider in solidworks, project summary report  (12 hours)

The total amount spent on parts for the spider was about $50. The purchases made include: 30 micro ball bearings, 15 servos, and the RF M4 receiver and remote. The group still needs to purchase screws/bolts to put all the parts together; we estimate this will be less than $10. We are waiting until the parts are finished printing, so we can get the correct sizes.

A final blog post for the project will be made once the spider is completely finished and functional. This post will include pictures of the completed assembly, a video of the spider in action, an assessment as to how well it works and what improvements we would make based on its performance.

Parts are all finished now. Here is an image of what we hope will come out of the 3d printer.

and a nice render, the actual scale will be something like 10 inches long with almost a foot legspan if all goes well.

Project update and code

Unfortunately, our servos still have not arrived, and may not for some time. If the servos do not arrive within the next couple of days we will just buy them from an electronic store. We have completed as much of the programming as possible, since it can only be completed once the servos arrive. The code for the spider is shown below.

Note: anything to the right of the "\" symbol indicates the comments.   

This code causes 2 motors to be able to toggle independently between the left state and right state. There will be a lot of changes for the final spider, but this is a proof of concept for the isoMax forth multitasker; it works very well. Another post including the update on the servo situation and the final coding for the spider will be in the near future.

Update on items purchased and other info

The group met earlier this week to further discuss the project, and to start the programming of the spider. Our RF M4 Reciever, 315MHz momentary type, recently arrived and we made a quick video to demonstrate how it will work. The receiver is connected to the breadboard, which uses the arduino board as the power source, and we have each button light up an LED.

The key fob that came with the receiver has 4 buttons, and we plan on having each button control all servos at once. The four buttons will control the forward, backward, left, and right movements of the spider. We also ordered about 30 micro bearings which recently came in. Although, we are still waiting for the servos we ordered to arrive. We need the dimensions of these servos in order to submit our final design of the spider to be 3D printed. Another post with the final designs of the spider, the coding for the spider, and other updates on the project are soon to come.

Wireless Controller and information update

After a long duration of research and thought, we have come to the decision of adding a wireless controller to the spider. This wireless controller will be purchased from the website adafruit and is already programmed. This will make the setup of attaching it to the spider simple. The parts are shown below. they are labeled as a simpler RF M4 receiver.

Second we would like to give some sources on the board we will be using. As said before it is a Servo-pod by New Micros, Inc. The link to the website can be seen below. The specifications and features of this board make it a prime candidate for motion controlled designs and can be seen on the website by following the first link. The programming we plan to use is isomax. Some information on it can be read about on the second link.


Servo-pod
http://www.newmicros.com/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newmicros.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fstore%2Forder.cgi%3Fform%3Dprod_detail%26part%3DServoPod

Isomax
http://www.newmicros.com/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newmicros.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fstore%2Forder.cgi%3Fform%3Dprod_detail%26part%3DIsomax

Spider Update

The design of the spider has been further completed and the legs are now included. A bottom and side view of the spider can be seen below.

The legs will use six more servo motors to move it forward and backwards. 15 servo motors were purchased and will be used to move the spider. One of the problems that we ran into however was that the volume of the parts required to fully construct the spider are a bit more than the available material. We will be looking for a solution to this problem and may end up purchasing more material to accommodate for it.

Our first part was 3D printed on Wednesday 11/20. There was a problem with the printing due to it printing the wrong part at first. This set us back a few hours, although the correct part was printed out soon after. A few pictures of the part can be seen below. The servo was placed inside to test if it fit and it was a snug fit.

To be done in the future is further modeling of the parts in solid works which then need to be printed. The board that we are using is the servopod and the programming language is isomax. This code is going to be completed soon after the part if not at the same time. The whole group was present on Wednesday for over an hour completing parts, printing, and discussing the project as it is now and future ideas.

Another post updating the progress of the spider will be in the near future. We will have solid parts of the legs and more to come.