In the spirit of my last post on the topic, here is another video-only update on a new leg design for the quad A1:

The moteus controller, communicates exclusively over CAN-FD for command, telemetry, and diagnostics. It will accept either standard or extended frames, and until now, the ID format in terms of bits looked like the following:

33333222222221111111100000000
43210765432107654321076543210
XXXXXXXXXXXXXQSSSSSSSDDDDDDDD

Where:

• X: Don’t care
• Q: 1 for query, 0 for no query
• S: source ID
• D: destination ID

If the lower 8 bits matched the configured ID, all the X bits would be completely ignored and moteus would accept the CAN message as if it were destined for itself. This may not be super desirable, as it consumes nearly all of the available CAN-FD addressing space.

I and the quad A1 had a great time at the FAB16 festival in Somerville this past weekend. The robot got to do a lot of running around, it and I got to meet a lot of new people, and two bands showed up!

Here’s a video of the quad A1 and Spot hanging out trying tricks:

And here’s another one of a “dance off” (kinda) with the School of Honk band. Note that although both robots collapsed at the end of this video, the quad A1 got back up and kept dancing. (Spot wasn’t broken, they just didn’t want to right it when close-ish to people). Thanks to Kathleen and Josh from BD for inviting me into their area and for being such good sports!

The title says it all! Check out the quad A1 and friends there!

Check out the quad A1 and all the mjbots products at the FAB16 festival in Somerville, MA this Saturday August 14th from 10am to 4pm (with a rain date on Sunday).

I’m going to try something new for this effort, and instead of making a bunch of blog posts culminating in a video, I’m going to make a bunch of intermediate progress videos. They may, but may not, culminate in an overview blog post. Here’s the first!