Working with nodebots/johnny-five has being a remarkably positive experience. Because you can expose your objects to the REPL, it’s a breeze to test/exersize your code without having to upload it to the Arduino every time. The iteration cycle between changes is much, much quicker than regular Arduino sketches and the cognitive dissonance between what I do during the day and in my freetime is non existing.

After implementing the simple trig IK function to control the position of the feet, I implemented two move sequences: “lift & place” and “drag”.

“Lift and place”, lifts the foot from the current position and place it at the requested x value (when the position of the hip is 0). “Drag”, well drags the foot along the ground from the current position to the required x position.

To implement a creeping gait I divide a step into 4 available positions. From position one to five we have a drag and from position four to one when have a lift and place.

In this gait there is always only one foot in the air. The recipe look like this (the green dot represent the foot):

As you can see from the video, Felix has a heavy limp. I’ll be working on the servo offsets so the small differences between the initial leg positions dont add up.

Next I’ll start playing with some sort of dashboard with AngularJS and sockets.io.