Love digging up a horse and beating it again? Well fellas I'm here to help you out!
Lets start another up to date discussion about the use of, and the support of, Dynamixels and the HerkuleX line of professional servos. I'm moving up a level with some upcoming projects and steering away from the hobby style servos. I've spent days researching, using geared stepper motors, geared DC motors as servos and have come back full circle to serial servos. Due in part, by all the unknowns and unreliability associated with creating a servo from scratch.
Tell me about your success and failures of using the Dynamixel and HerkuleX servos with EZB. Please be detailed in your experience and add something to what is already written in the prior threads about subject. What needs to change/improve for better support? Perhaps this is adding to existing plugins or writing new ones? Speaking of plug ins (this is probably another topic), but i wonder if there would be more incentive to create plug ins if there was a pay for development? Like how the app store works? Just a thought there.
I really believe in everything EZ robot and want to continue using the products, because well its so EZ and the results are amazing. I'm well aware the majority of sales is in the education market for EZ Robot and therefore guides their company. But, how can we work together as a group to build support for the next level of servos and professional robotics? And ask ourselves what is the motivation to do so?
69 developer,
It may come to that. Please expand on how that works. Do you have program predefined movements in the arbotix controller and then "call" them from ARC? For example sounds simple but apparently not....
"Robot take this" Gripper opening as the shoulder joint rotates upward. Elbow begins to bend out, wrist rotates into position, gripper closes on object and stops. Do all of these movements need a predefined code? Thanks
BTW id much rather script all of that in ARC. How hard was the learning curve for the arbotix. For some reason I am picturing arduino type coding.
@69developer, that's exactly what I had suggested earlier in this thread. Let me know if you proceed down this road. Just want to cover my bases. As this is a very important project.
Will do you know how to program that board? ( arbotix-m)?
I'm reading on it now. Several programs to use. It uses ardurino environment to code. There are also a couple of UI for creating poses and storing them in flash using python. Seems to be several other programs written as well. Should be able use serial to communicate from EZB to the board. You have to get a piggy back board to go onto ArbotiX to use any of the dynamixels other than the 12 But still going to try the plug in and work through that first.
If you need anything, you can find me on Twitter.
Please keep me up on your progress. I need to use these dynamixels now I cant turn back. Thanks again!
Thanks 69developer!
@kamaroman68, I'll post my progress here.
I remembered today that there is a good resource to learn more about the Dynamixel, which is a great servo, especially when you get into the model 24 and above.
Dynamixel Information