Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
In my last post about the VEX IQ building system I had a small video featuring my VEX Quadruped. I’ve done a bit of work on it since then and the gait has been greatly improved. I also added some small rubber feet on the legs. These are the traction links from the Tank Tread & Intake Kit.
Due to the heavy load that these motors are under, you may find that the batteries will run down a bit faster than you’re used to. Good thing the kits come with a charger!
Up next on the agenda is to add some sensors and have it interact a bit more. The little wheels on the bottom are not used when it is walking; the robot is fully lifted off the ground.
I’ve taken some picture, so you can see how it’s put together. These should be enough to copy the design, should you wish to. You can download the program to run this here: [LINK]. Note that part of the code is based on the excellent guide on creating an Arduino based quadruped: [LINK].
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[…] of you may remember I posted about my VEX IQ Quadruped a while back. I now have building instructions for it! They were made by Christopher Richard […]
You mentioned in the first post that the VEX IQ sensors are I2C. Do you have any information about the pins of the cable? I’m interested in using some VEX IQ sensors with another microcontroller.
Hi there,
Check out https://github.com/jpearman/viq_reference_sensor for details on how to hook it up!
= Xander
Great build Xander. I built this for my 6th grade STEM class, but I can’t figure out where to plug in each motor so I can use all the buttons on my remote to operate it. Any help would be awesome. Thank you.
If you check out the source code, the motors have been given names that should make it easy to understand which is which.
#pragma config(Motor, motor1, FRONT_L_KNEE, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, reversed, encoder)#pragma config(Motor, motor2, FRONT_L_SHOULDER, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor5, FRONT_R_KNEE, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor6, FRONT_R_SHOULDER, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor7, BACK_L_KNEE, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor8, BACK_L_SHOULDER, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor11, BACK_R_KNEE, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, reversed, encoder)
#pragma config(Motor, motor12, BACK_R_SHOULDER, tmotorVexIQ, PIDControl, encoder)
The
motor2,motor5, are also the port numbers, so motor2 is the 2nd port on the VEX IQ.Does that help?
Yes, that helped. Thank you.