I’m back with another update. It’s been a little while, but I got a LOT done over the past two weeks.
My last update involved building the simulation side of my project: the water and the vessel. Now I have a motion pipeline that sends data from Unity to my Arduino!
This pipeline was created with hardware and safety in mind, so I’m able to constrain translation, velocity, and acceleration with proper startup and shutdown sequencing.
Technical details…
The red axis shows the raw motion of the boat, whereas the green axis is the processed motion. You’ll notice that the green axis is constrained in the y-axis; this is intentional to show how the pipeline can bound the motion sent toward hardware.
The pipeline includes a handshake, pose sequences, acknowledgements, latest-state delivery, stale-input handling, and a controller-side watchdog that stops output if valid commands stop arriving.
Processed motion can be constrained by translation, rotation, velocity, and acceleration, and can also include additional smoothing.
I have upgraded from the SG90 micro servos to the beefier MG996R servos, which have more torque for the six-servo prototype.
There are some other developments as well, not shown in the video. I wanted to keep it short and sweet.
Next up: designing and 3D-printing the structure for the six-servo Stewart platform base and top platform. This is where it all starts coming together!
Stay tuned.