Rear legs on Hexa MKII fail after 5 minutes?

[noxgenus]

Hi Kurt, thanks for all the awesome code over the years. I know this is old, but I'm trying to get my old MKII working with Phoenix again, as I had to replace the main arbotix board.

I used to run the older Phoenix code on it, which worked great, but now I replaced the board and loaded up this updated MKII code, after 5 minutes the hexapod rear legs fail and its bottom drops to the floor.

my guess is because I use AX18 servos instead of AX12, the voltage specs might be different? I see you run a check on the rear servos

Any clue why this might be happening?

[KurtE]

Sorry, I have no idea what is happening.

I have not done much with this for years. Are you still using an Arbotix board? I have not done anything with an AVR based
boards for a really long time now. So I am completely rusty with this.

Main difference between AX18 and AX12 is the speed that the servos can run. They potentially might draw more current. When it fails, are there LEDS flashing on the servos? Maybe they went into some error state. In some cases I ask one or more servos for their current voltage as a way to detect if battery is getting low and potentially shut down the hex before the battery gets damaged.
On most boards that I did, I added a voltage divider circuit that could detect it without having to ask servos.

There is also sometimes the issue that one or more servos reset their ID to #1 so there is optional code that I avoid using 1 and at startup it checks for all of the servos and if does not find one and servo #1 exists, it assumes that the missing servo was reset and it then tries to reprogram it back to what it believes it is supposed to be...

I have had times when a servo wire goes bad. for example maybe caught in a someplace that can short out, or maybe when it bends, it breaks connection and in these cases it will take out all of the servos that daisy chain from that location...

Sorry as I mentioned I don't have any better clues.

[noxgenus]

Thanks so much for the feedback Kurt! Then I guess it's an electrical problem that popped up the same time as I updated the firmware, as I also did some rewiring... I did notice the failing legs were not throwing errors, so I assumed it was code, but now I opened it up, the failing legs are all on that extra dynamixel hub board, connected to the Arbotix with those flimsy wires.

Think it's best to just throw out all the old Arbotix stuff and swap it with a Teensy or something, probably less of a fuss anyway ;)

Thanks again!

[noxgenus]

ok, after individual debug and testing each servo, the AX18 servos that were problematic started smoking hahaha problem found