Rudeo Clown @perilouswaif - Tumblr Blog

After a hiatus to work on other projects, it's back to servo testing for the biped!

My main problem turned out to be a physical connection pin issue with the servo-hat and Raspberry Pi 5, but easily solved sawing off the base of the port.

Good news, however, is that testing revealed a weakness in the modular lower leg to ankle connectors, which I suspected were a bit weak anyway. Good excuse to do proper re-designs there and for the hips!

We found all kinds of Hexpaod Cousins to hang out with at Open Sauce!

We had a couple of hitches but everything worked out in the end. So many bots and cool people. More soon!

#hexapod #opensauce2025 #hexapodclub #robotics

Just some siblings going for a walk

I need a better video with them going at the same speed. What was much better was back at Robogames where Xevel’s Xachicoma robot lead mine around the floor.

Next time: videos of the bots flexin’

#robot pets #robots #hexapod

thursdayisbetterthanfriday

Field Testing AI - FLOR-ID

Got some good field testing done on the flower ID app last week. A nice, relatively straightforward, bit of coding to try out how TensorFlow works on Android devices.

Uses the Oxford-102 Flowers dataset, and a Convolutional Neural Network, to identify flowers. Fairly straightforward for a model.

Of course, using on pre-taken datasets is nice, but the real world provides a much greater bounty of real flowers to classify!

A great excuse for a walk around the South coast and see some fun sights. Also an excuse to wolf down some pub-grub and see the sun for once after getting stapled to a damn chair.

Currently, returning the top predicted result gives around a 75% accuracy when given images of what it's already seen.

With other projects in the works, I might not work too much more on this. Considering adding in a Top-5 prediction output, "achievement" style checklist to "catch-em-all" and a URL functionality to open a Wikipedia entry for each flower - so you can check the accuracy for yourself. Also, likely to add in a "no flower" class to the dataset, just to avoid classifying concrete as a Dandelion or something silly like that. If anyone has better flower datasets (Creative Commons licence/similar with more classes) I'd be very interested to know.

If you want a copy to compile an .apk for yourself, you can grab the current version here:

Contribute to ThursdaysMan/FLOR-ID_Flower_ID_App development by creating an account on GitHub.

Currently gathering the dusty old code I've made over the past couple of years on the Desktop PC and putting it together on GitHub, so there will be more goodies on the way.

perilouswaif

This reminds me, I still want to build a robot that seeks out the cursed globe chamomile and rips it from the earth

And the two siblings did emerge, one born of wood and one of platinum.

I only have one ArbotiX so one of these are running an Arduino Uno with a library I modified back in the day. I’m kinda shocked how quick it came together.

I need to solder a new connectors one several batteries, but after that I should be able to run them both simultaneously. From there I have a couple of tricks I want to work on before Friday, but even if I don’t get those done , I’m pretty happy with progress so far.

#robotics #dynamixel #servos #hexapod #opensauce2025 #arduino

002 is coming along. I’m trying a lower deck for the battery- it shouldn’t stifle movement too much but we’ll see. This is a bit of a rush job but I’ve got some plans for the platinum PLA in the future.

#robotics #hexapod

That went…. surprisingly well. It needs some redesigning , my battery is much too large and just held on with straps at the moment, but I’m still happy.

Now to decide how much more I can pull off before Open Sauce…

#robotics #hexapod #dynamixel #robot pets

I love it when a plan comes together.

Though the scraps I used for the legs and bodies might be a little thick, so the m2x6 bolts don’t work. Guess I’m spending a few hours sorting bolts so I have enough m2x8s. This thing is gonna be a real Frankenstein’s monster.

#servos #robotics

Finally, a use for my big ol’ 12v80A PSU

I don’t really need them running all at once, but I don’t think I’ll have them all together like this again, so why not?

So they all official work. One broken gear really is a minor miracle.

#servos #robotics

Sorry couldn’t help myself

#servo #robot #why so serious?

Rise my army!

Ok, so out of the 72 servos , all of them connect, report data and move. One of them has confirmed gear damage and another 18 have a fully functional gear set. Now I just need to check the gears on the rest. All I’m doing for gear checks is making sure they move with a little bit of load - hence the brackets installed on the first 18. Not the most full-proof method, but it should weed out the big problems.

I noticed that there are a lot of them where the servo horns aren’t at the correct angle. I’m guessing that during disassembly of various robots, someone started unscrewing servo horn bolts in a mad dash to take everything apart. And then paid zero attention to the orientation.

And of course we have some “too long bolt disease”. We’ll just put that horn back on and ignore that.

Still I’m happy with the state of everything. After tearing the rest of the servos it’s going to be build time!

#robotics #servos #do you want to know how I got these scars?

I am now the proud owner of an inadvisable number of Robotis AX-12 servos -72 to be exact. Most of them are the middle gen AX-12+ variants, but it looks like at least one set is the final stage AX-12As

Of course, dear reader, you must be asking “Why?!” ( if not “how? and “…what?”)

Back in my Trossen/Interbotix days, I had such a fun time taking robots to Maker Faires and showing off the little beasts. I still do something similar with a variety of robots at school STEAM days, but it’s very been using pretty bare-basic hobby servos.

Now don’t get me wrong - AX-12As were only a step above hobby servos when they were new and now they’re just this side of obsolete. However between the code and my experience with them (and a touch of nostalgia ) they make the perfect servo for what I want to do.

So after finding an eBay listing for 4 Bioloid Comprehensive kits for a steal, I had to do it.

Stay tuned reader, we’re just getting started.

#robotics #bioloid #robotic #hexapod #too many servos #servos #ax-12

murderofsomeone

"don't hang up yet... I'm not done."

Presenting the Spirit Phone

I’ve had a couple of these antique funeral home phones forever - I don’t even remember where I got them. Originally I had wanted to set them up in different cities so they would only call each other.

I never got around to it, but I did put one up on my workshop wall and it had been sitting there idle until I found an amazing bootleg poster to put next to it.