Thank you ! All hydraulic parts have been purchased from the company Leimbach Modellbau.
Currently about 10 cm / second. The main limiting factor is the volume flow rate of the hydraulic pump which limits speed of the cylinder action. L3X-Z already contains a dual-pressure-circuit pump, enabling two separate hydraulic circuits in the robot, one for the left side, one for the right and therefore doubling the volume flow rate. Possible improvements would be:
Add another dual-pressure-circuit pump (doubling the volume flow rate).
Replace the current cylinders with cylinders with a smaller diameter (requiring less volume to be filled). (This is an option because the current cylinder diameter - and directly linked with it the applicable force - has been selected to be on the safe side, so there’s room for optimisation.
Unfortunately made miniature hydraulic gear is (= expensive), so both options come with considerable cost. Any contribution (be it one-time or regular) would be greatly appreciated (shameless plug ).
Thank you very much for your advice re FFF design. In this area there’s much I have to learn . For example all those nice CNC-milled parts are from a ( ) company which is in the business of producing front panels for electronic devices. They even have a self-developed, multi-platform software-tool tailored to creating such front panels where you can place your order directly from within the tool (talking about “industry 4.0” ). The cool thing about them is that per default they support panels up to 10 mm (more on request) so what I’ve been using them for is not for front panels but for custom CNC-milling. The not so cool part is that the import of DXF files (as cool as that feature is, since it allows you to feed the output from another CAD software into the tool) is not as straight-forward as it could be and requires some manual adjustment. Frankly, I’m incredibly happy that we did not have to rework a single part .
Love it! Looks very cool and neatly designed! Which CAD software have you used for this?
Since I’m a big fan of having neat logos representing the various projects I’m working on it was a given to have a nice logo for the hexapod project (possibly a bit late for this years ELROB but definitely in time for next years ENRICH). So let’s have it:
After taking more than six months since the culmination of ELROB 22, here it is at last: Everything you’ve ever (or maybe never) wanted to know about the L3X-Z construction and its participation in ELROB 22 is detailed in the following article:
OpenCyphalServoController12 (Hardware, Firmware)
This board allows to control up to 12 PWM RC servos via Cyphal. Within L3X-Z its used for controlling the hydraulic valves.
l3xz-leg-ctrl-hardware (Hardware, Firmware)
This board situated on each leg of L3X-Z determines the joints angular position with magnetic position sensors and publishes it using Cyphal to various consumers.
CAN-Power-Injector (Hardware)
No Cyphal board but allows to inject 5V (and up to 5A) into the CAN bus supplying all connected devices. No more separate wires for power supply needed.
This is neat. Would be even neater if the firmware did not have hard-coded port identifiers and did not rely on the node-IDs for application-layer functionality! I take it that with the new 107-Arduino-Cyphal it would be a no-brainer to drop the hard-coded topics.
Its happening main blocker was persistent register storage which is now solved. Expect a separate post in the 107-Arduino-Cyphal thread and on the subject of 107-Arduino-Cyphal-Support.
Another milestone has been achieve. The full Cyphal network has been wired up (on a yet temporary basis) and all nodes have been configured using yakut and yaml. (Details to be found here).
Afterwards I was rewarded by seeing the full transport matrix and all 6 leg controllers, 1 auxiliary controller, 1 valve controller as well as one Orel 20 (for the hydraulic pump). The radiation sensor is not in the list as its currently under final assembly @generationmake .
The newly designed “Dragonbeard” (thank you very much @scottdixon for your FANTASTIC work !!! ) colour/thermal imaging head which has both pan and tilt control:
Additionally there’s a Orel 20 ESC for driving the hydraulic pump as well as the ros2_cyphal_bridge for streaming selected Cyphal messages as ROS topics for further internal processing.
This brings the total number of Cyphal network devices up to 11 (12).
This increases the number of 107-Arduino-Cyphal based Cyphal-networked devices running flawlessly on a single 250 kBits/s CAN network to 11 plus one more which is a Zubax Orel 20 = 12 Cyphal enabled devices on a single CAN bus.
ENRICH 2023 is upon us and I’d like to share a couple of pictures from Day #1.
Location is the never-turned-on nuclear power plant Zwentendorf in Austria .
The event’s purpose is to provide a real-world testing ground for robotic systems in a scenario simulating a radiation incident at a nuclear power plant.
! All hydraulic parts have been purchased from the 
company Leimbach Modellbau.
(= expensive), so both options come with considerable cost. Any contribution (be it one-time or regular) would be greatly appreciated (shameless plug 
).
. For example all those nice CNC-milled parts are from a ( 
. So following the tradition of IEEE Spectrum / Automaton let’s have a 
much to explore, we have barely scratched the surface 
.
