| Besides finishing the construction of Bing's
feet (yay, I get to play with something except feet!), I
relaxed in the evenings by doing the following things this
week:
Built a few parts of the lower legs, which are the next
project. It has some weirdly shaped parts but isn't very
complicated -- it just needs to be a solid base for the two
ankle servos, attach firmly to the foot, and terminate in a
knee. The knee will be a little bearing encased in the
key-shaped gizmo at the top of the design image to the left.
Built a little board with 8 LEDs, which could be status
indicators. I'm not sure I'll actually use it, as I'll
have a small LCD display as well. The board uses a shift
register (74595) so I can use three I/O lines to set all 8
LEDs.
Built a little board to which I will attach the contact
sensors in the foot pads and a couple of other control
switches.
Decided for the third time to change how the vision will be
done; I am getting a board with more processing power to
offload the image processing from the MPC555. More on
this later.
Decided to focus on the mechanical stuff for a while and
leave most of the software and remaining electronics, to be
added in vivo. It is important to me to get the
platform as soon as possible to start evaluating it and
debugging it (and likely rebuilding parts of it!). Maybe
by the middle of December.
Built an audio input circuit, based around a little
electret mic I got from Marlin P Jones for about two
dollars. The output of the circuit will feed directly
into an A/D converter. In case anybody is curious, here
is the circuit diagram:
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