My wife was nice enough to suprise me this Christmas with a picture of a Hexy. No Hexy, just a picture
She ordered it on the 17th of November and quite a few weeks passed before it was shipped so I guess there were some manufacturing holdups. Weāre in Australia too which doesnāt help considering it would have been shipped internationally right around Christmas time. None of this stopped me from suggesting that sheād forgotten to get me something and printed a pic of one out on Christmas eve though! Anyway it did turn up on the 3rd of Jan 2013 and was worth the wait in my opinion!
I had a ton of fun putting it together, even went to the trouble of grabbing a pin vise from work so I could drill the servo horn mounting holes out to 2mm which made for what I think was much nicer assembly of that part of the build. I even stuck a little vid up on youtube showing the process and how it improves the fitment over the ājust force the screw inā method.
For the most part the build went together quite well, there was a āHā section from one of the legs which looks appears to have been cut out of 1mm thicker material than the others and wouldnāt fit, but the 7th leg bag of spares provided me with a replacement piece of the correct size (thankyou!). One of the body upgrights needed some time spent on it with a needle file so the slots which extend from the piece under the Servotor32 board would key into it. Iām not sure how runout like that happens on a laser cutter but it seems to have occured on a couple of pieces. Nothing to worry about though, this is a kit and getting everything to āworkā is part of the experience.
I did run into a problem when I went to power the unit up using 5 x AA NiCad batteries thoughā¦ Can anyone spot the problem with this next picture?
For the time being itās 4 x AA cells for me If itās not obvious to you, the leftmost battery holder has been manufactured with two springs and the rightmost one has none, meaning that the AA cells simply wonāt make contact, rendering this part unusable.
Anyway here it is all put together.
To start with I followed the guide and set it up under Window 7 x64 with no problems. I spent some time and zeroād all my servo positions and saved the offsets. Hexy managed all of the moves in PyMoCo on my desk, but when placed on the carpet floor and performing a belly flop one of the legs caught the floor and it broke the lower leg servo. Oh well I know not to do that againā¦ I replaced it with the spare servo but then noticed that an upper thigh servo on the other side had failed also That was disappointing; itās a shame about the servo quality, but on a kit where there are twenty servos, even a modest increase in servo price would equate to twenty times that added to the total kit price so I understand the decision which had to be made here to keep the kit at a competitive price point. I hope thereās something on the horizon with respect to the metal or carbon gear servos I read about in some other threads on here.
[size=150]Bluetooth + Linux = a late night[/size]
Hexy is fun, but a tethered Hexy is boring, it can only live on or near my desk so I took it upon myself to get the bluetooth working. Not having BT on my desktop pc and not wanting to use my tuning (work) laptop for the task as it normally lives next to my dyno at work I decieded Iād give the other laptop I have here at home a go with it. Itās running Ubuntu 12.10 which I only installed because FreeBSD doesnāt play well with ext4 and I was tasked with recovering about 300Gb of data from from an ext4 partition on a drive which was half dead.
To start with, I had to work out where and how to connect the BT module to Hexy. Thankfully the wiki proved invaluable here and gave me a very clear picture of where to plug it in plus some basic setup information. Nothing about linux unfortunatelyā¦
The first little hurdle to jump is that Ubuntuās standard installed bluetooth manager WILL NOT allow you to pair to a device with a fixed pin, this is a bug (in the GUI) which apparently has been around for several years and I find remarkable that it hasnāt been dealt with. The āfixā or rather workaround I discovered is to open the Ubuntu Software Centre and search for āBlueman bluetooth managerā and install it. Upon running the newly installed BT manager I am able to connect to and pair with the BT device. After connecting to the ArcBotics device, if you click setup and specify āserial portā and hit Forward you should be greeted with the message that the device is now available at /dev/rfcomm0
The next hurdle is PoMoCo will not find the device when paired via bluetooth. I was able to successfully perform the baud rate setting to 9600 of the BT module via the servotor using my windows box and code posted on the wiki page. I had to modify the code in the 9600 baud file as per the wiki for the baud change to be successful. I hacked around with the code a bit and made python display a list of all the ports it was querying in the shell window and /dev/rfcomm0 wasnāt among the list. Ok I thought, Iāll just cheat the system and hardcode the BT device address into the servotorComm.py file. That didnāt work either. Hmm, ok time to look a bit deeper. I installed putty and tried connecting as a serial terminal to /dev/rfcomm0 and got a permission denied errorā¦ Thereās a clue, this time I ran putty as root (sudo putty) and tried the connection again. Success! Closed python IDLE and ran āsudo idle-python2.7ā, opened PoMoCo.py with my modified servotorComm.py file with the hardcoded /dev/rfcomm0 address and Hexy sprang to life - with no wires and under Linux no less! I think Iāve earnt myself the right to go to bed now itās after 3:00am!!
I will come back to this post / thread and hopefully update the linux connection instructions in some detail with screenshots, or possibly do a youtube vid if itās going to be of any use to anyone. My linux skills are basic and as for programming; if I told you the last time I wrote code was about 18 years ago and it was using Borlandās Turbo Pascal Iām sure the reader can fill in the gapsā¦ It something I hope to address this year
Hope this post hasnāt been too boring or off topic. I know there will be a better way of achieving the result under Linux and Iād be happy to read and/or learn how.
A big thanks to Joe for starting something which I think is just fantastic. It was really nice to open an electronic product and not have the instructions in broken English and āMade in Chinaā written all over it. Keep up the good work!
Lastly - I canāt wait till you guys are listing a quadrotor under the products tab of your website!