Sparky firmware

Arduino sketch + associated source files for running Sparky, the RHex-style hexapedal robot we designed for UC Berkeley's Introduction to Prototyping & Fabrication course.

Our code's made up of a few main components:

• an open-loop gait controller for generating synchronized leg trajectories
• six local joint controllers: these are simple PD loops w/ velocity feedforwards
• a BLE interface for sending status information & receiving twist commands
• a set of dynamically configurable settings which can be pushed to & pulled from the EEPROM (this is primarily for control loop tuning on the fly)

Demo video and relevant repositories:

• mechanical design
• main control PCB
• absolute encoder PCB

Potential features for the future:

• gait optimization based on accelerometer data (already supported by hardware -- for inclines, flip scenarios, etc)
• smarter leg control implementation
• quantitatively calculated leg trajectory parameters (speeds are currently preset)
• ROS support

Made possible by:

• Adafruit's nRF51-based BLE modules
• Adafruit's library for interfacing with the PCA9685 PWM driver
• br3ttb's PID library
• sosandroid's AS5048B library (for programming slave addresses)