Petoi robot joint index
We humans and many other legged animals have many joints. They give us the freedom to move in many ways. Though it's difficult to reproduce those complex motions on a robot, we can simplify all those joints to limited numbers of actuators.
When controlling so many joints, the first thing is to index them. We can define an order according to their distance from the torso. For example, the shoulder joint is closer to the torso than the elbow joint, and the joint that let us look around is closer to the torso than the joint that let us nod. If we had tails, it would be as close as the head compared to the shoulder joints.
So we can order the joints in this way: head panning, head tilting, tail panning, tail tilting, 4x shoulder (or hip) roll, 4x shoulder (or hip) pitch, 4x elbows (or knees). For the joints in the same distance group, we can index them clockwise from the front-left corner if the body is looked at from behind.
And when we map those joints to a specific robot, the indexing becomes more practical. The ordering for the joint servo pins on NyBoard is like below:
Nybble
Bittle
Although the BiBoard has only 12 pins, the joint index numbers are configured in the same order as the NyBoard. The connection between the joint servo and the pin is shown in the figure below：
Bittle / Bittle X
A servo plug has three wires. Plug it in the right direction or you may burn the chip. The color of wires may vary for different models. However, the darkest-colored (Black or Brown) wire (GND for ground) is always the GND wire as a convention. The GND wire should be plugged closest to the board.
The index number of the joint servo has no corresponding relationship with the PWM pin number on the main board. You don't even need to read the pin numbers on the PCB board.
Last modified 2mo ago