For some upcoming work, I needed to drive the quad A1 around without being tethered to a computer. To date, my control mechanisms have been:

• A web interface driven from a computer with joystick attached.
• A nrf24l01 link driven from a nrfusb attached to a computer.

Note, both of those methods involve being tethered to a computer, which makes it hard to be mobile. As a possibly short term solution to this problem, I went ahead and got a bluetooth “gaming” controller for my phone (non-affiliate amazon link):

I first wrote about the very very simple web UI for the quad A1 some time ago. That UI served its purpose, although it was largely inscrutable to anyone but myself, as the primary data display was a giant wall of unformatted JSON which filled most of the page. It was also pretty easy to accidentally pick the wrong mode, cause the robot to jump instead of walk, or cut power to everything.

Now that I had a controlled jump with the quad A0, I wanted to chain those jumps together into a pronking gait.  The first part of that was creating a mechanism by which I could actually command varying motion commands.  For the previous full rate experiments, all I had built was a CLI that allowed you to type commands.  That sufficed for initiating a single jump, but not really for moving around in space with a dynamic gait.  Something with a joystick would be necessary.