Link Update (Again) and Bonus Link Trig!

Once again, all my documentation permalinks got broken when Google Drive stopped supporting static URL hosting. But, I've transferred everything over to AWS now and gone through updating links accordingly on all the static project pages and a few select posts, especially this one. Hopefully these permalinks last a bit longer! Here's the full directory: https://scolton-www.s3.amazonaws.com/list.html. I may transfer more stuff over to there as I go, including maybe using it for hosting new static project pages. Still learning my way around AWS.

Speaking of links, here's an odd bit of trigonometry to solve last post's linkage mystery:

For Twitch X, I mentioned that rather than solving the trig for the geometry of the linkage that connects the two sets of diagonal wheels together (the sin/cos link, as I called it), I came up with a weird exponential parametric equation for the two angles:

x = [sin(θ1)]^K = 1 - [cos(θ2)]^K

The value x ranges from 0 to 1 as θ1 and θ2 both sweep from 0º to 90º, albeit on different trajectories. It makes an excellent feedback variable for the controller, since it can be derived from a simple weighted average of the two linkage angle sensors (after trig and exponent). And conveniently, x = 0.5 is where the wheel sets are perpendicular, for omni mode. For the link lengths used on Twitch X (L1 = 1.00in, L3 = 7.50in), I experimentally derived K = 1.23456789...no joke. But I wasn't ever convinced this was an exact solution, and as it turns out it isn't.

A few pages of trig later, this is the actual parametric solution:

L3*[cos(θ2) + sin(θ1) - 1] = L1*sin(θ1 + θ2)

This one's a lot less convenient from a control standpoint: since θ1 and θ2 are on both sides of the equation it's not obvious what to do with the wheels based on measurements of the linkage angles, at least not without further math. But this is the geometrically accurate solution.

What's amazing is how close the other parametric equation is. As it turns out, the max error is just over 1º and the value K = 1.23456789 is actually a pretty good one in terms of the average error over the full range from 0 to 90º:

None of this matters as far as Twitch X control software is concerned - the exponential approximation with θ1 and θ2 separated is still far better for the application. But solving the mystery of the sin/cos link was really interesting.