Creating a program on Linux to control your quadruped

You now know that you can talk to your servomotor controller, and move your servos. In this section, you'll create a Python program that will let you talk to your servos to move them to specific angles.

Let's start with a simple program that will make your legged mobile robot's servos go to 90 degrees (the middle of the 0 to 180 degrees you can set). This particular controller uses bytes of information, so the code will translate the input of the channel and angle to numbers that the controller can understand. For more details, see http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J40. Here is the code to move all the connected servos to the 90 degree point:

Here is an explanation of the code:

• #! /usr/bin/python: This first line allows you to make this Python file executable from the command line.

• import serial: This line imports the serial library. You need the serial library to talk to your unit via USB.

• def setAngle(ser, channel, angle): This function converts...