Tag Archives: hexy

Hexy’s power woes revisited

I found this great article (where I shamelessly stole the image to the left from) it has a lot of stress testing on different alkalines and they threw in some rechargables.  You can clearly see by the graph that most alkalines are going to buckle real fast when you try to draw 2 amps from them.  This makes sense because when I was using the alkalines the result was much worse than the bench power supply (which current limits shortly after 3A).  If you look further down he does this test on some NIMH cells and he was able to get 5A out of it without too much voltage drop.  This is clearly the explanation why the alkalines were so horrible.  So I got a few different power options coming.   I got some cheap buck regulators from fleabay and some cells coming.  Hopefully it’s sufficient to at least run through the demo software properly!

Hexy the Hexapod build

 

2013-03-14 02.31.30I got my Hexy the hexapod kit from the kickstarter finally, maybe 6 months late.  Reasonable in kickstarter terms.  Anyhoo I decided to put it together last night.  The build process was pretty straight forward, however towards the end when you get into like mounting the battery pack / routing wires / etc things get a little sketchy.   I guess my biggest gripe right now would be with the power, I need to order some lithium/nimh cells or do a custom battery pack or something.  Alkalines aren’t goint to cut it.  I was a little sad not to have gotten much movement out of it.  I even hooked it up to my bench power supply but it maxxed it out at 3A and still just failed.