Power 1501MG Servo Apology and First Robotic Leg Test                    

Speed PWM modified servo

My apologies to the Power Servo company about my complaints concerning their 1501MG servo. I discovered that the six volt bench-top power supply that I had been using to power them, could not deliver the required current. I spent the last few weeks tinkering with the internal servo circuits and twice building replacements. I got the same screwy results with my circuits. When I used the servos to test the vehicle’s on-board 6 volt supply, suddenly everything worked fine. There was never anything wrong with the servos and I will be using them just as they came out of the box. Servo PWM speed control is an interesting idea but the generic servo is going to be less complex to use.

The newly installed leg calipers can stop the legs from swinging at any position. I wrote a short Arduino program to test the concept of rapidly swinging the legs front and back, powered only by the stored potential energy of the knee movement. The action is similar to how a child pumps on a swing to make it go. It looks like this concept is going to work fine. Check out the video.

A concern at the moment is that sometimes there is harmonic motion in the piston movements that can cause a leg to shake. I have to think of a way to dampen this kind of movement.