In the last post, I mentioned I was having reservations about OpenScad, and its suitability as CAD software for KIWI. The primary source of these reservations was simply that after making only minor headway, each operation had become so tedious. Simple things like a bracket for a servo was becoming far too much trial and error for my liking. Initially, I thought I’d be able to simply take some measurements of my part before I begin modelling, save them as variables “servo_width, servo_height” or something similar, then use these dimensions to define our extrusions/cuts for the servo mounts.
In our last post, we blocked out a primitive 3d model of our inverted pendulum. From here, the next step is to get the basic mesh into Gazebo, to allow us to begin testing in simulation.
From Zero to Gazebo I suspect that everyone who has ever used ROS has had to deal with the horror of building/installing ROS. It can become a serious pain, and you wouldn’t believe the number of hours I’ve had to spend in the past dealing with missing/incorrect dependencies, or the source code refusing to compile.
I’ve been wanting to get better about writing updates more frequently than I am currently. One of the big reasons for taking so long between posts is that I’m absolutely horrible at judging where exactly I should ‘plant the flag’ in a project, and get to writing about it. This is most evident in ORNIS, where I literally spent six months writing code, and didn’t write a single word about it until it was essentially a mvp.
