Exoskeleton Yaw Joint

Post date: Aug 14, 2014 3:42:40 PM

Added a yaw joint to the exoskeleton to allow the foot to rotate which gives the wearer the ability to turn instead of only walking forward. The first version of the yaw joint (the T shaped piece near the bottom of my calf) used ball bearings and wasn't very smooth (video). For the second version I used 10 small ring bearings to create rollers which works much better. I also wired up all of the potentiometers on the left leg. Reading their values and sending them over wifi with an Adruino Mega and a TI CC3000 wifi board is fast (tested up to 20Hz). The only problem is that the CC3000 randomly blocks on sending sometimes for up to a full second. If this can't be fixed I'll need to figure out another way to transmit the data wirelessly (wifi from an android device, beaglebone, or maybe bluetooth).