Zapatitos

This robot was developed by my colleague and friend Alberto Calvo and me during our studies at University. We got the best possible mark because of the originality and complexity of it.

It’s got 8 Hitec servos (2 per leg) and it could perform some nice sequences of movement which looked really natuZapatitos-3ral. All the control was achieved inside a Xilinx Spartan II FPGA and the code was entirely written in VHDL. The servo controller was a hardware core which accepted a 8bit word for the position and another 8bit word to set the desired speed.

The sequencer and the interface to the PC was implemented inside a PicoBlaze microcontroller synthetized directly into the FPGA. There was no kind of feedback and it just played the stored sequences in its memory but it was quite flexible since we managed to simulate them on the PC.

This is an old project (2003) and due to a data loss I cannot recover any videos or screenshots but I will try to rebuild it someday.

Regards,

Daniel