A puzzle

Boy do I have a good one for you today!

First off, version 0.2 pre-pre-alpha-alpha-etc is available. Please download it and try it out - report any bugs or suggestions in the comments.

The improvements in this update focus on enabling the execution of pre-generated actions, such as those from the robobuilder site. A few are included in the Hunobasic.h header for demonstration purposes. I have also written a few useful functions to transfer data from program memory to working memory (which will probably be the subject of the next update).

In keeping with the philosophy of not trying to rewrite the default firmware, I've broken the procedure for executing an action (which is a series of poses) into much smaller steps, which makes it much more intuitive.

Here is the method of making the robot walk forwards:

        getPGMWordArray((int*)HunoBasic_WalkForward_TrTime, (int*)delay, HUNOBASIC_WALKFORWARD_NUM_ACTION);

//Load transition times

        for(i = 0; i <= HUNOBASIC_WALKFORWARD_NUM_ACTION; i++)
        {

//For every pose in the action,
            getPGMByteArray((char*)HunoBasic_WalkForward_Position[i],(char*)position,16);

//Load the angle for each of the servos
            setPose(position,torque,16);

//Tell each servo to move
            if(i < (HUNOBASIC_WALKFORWARD_NUM_ACTION))
            {

//After each frame, except the last,
                j = delay[i];
                while(j > 0){_delay_ms(1);j--;}

//Pause for the required transition time.... 

//wait... 

//..WTF??
            }
        }

What's up with that last part? Why would you loop ten times and each time delay for 1ms, when you could just delay for 10ms in one go?

Well, here's why - it doesn't work!

Substituting the line with:

_delay_ms(delay[i]);

will pause for a much longer time than it should. If you have a AVR, please test this out for me and confirm it. However, passing a constant value to _delay_ms() works exactly as intended. I've tried it many ways, but this is the only method which works so far.

_delay_ms(25);
works, but
delay[i] = 25; 
_delay_ms(delay[i]);
does not.

Mysterious.

As I've mentioned before, this solution is hacky and unattractive. But I thought I might upload the code (the rest of which is working fine) and see if anyone has any suggestions as to why this might be.