9veedz/4leggedspiderbot

This is a project for a four-legged walking robot controlled by an ESP32, a small and inexpensive Wi-Fi-capable microcontroller. The robot has 12 servos (three per leg: a hip joint, an upper leg segment, and a lower leg segment), and it moves by coordinating those servos using a technique called inverse kinematics. Inverse kinematics means you specify where you want a foot to land in 3D space, and the code calculates the angles each servo needs to reach that position, rather than controlling each joint angle directly. Control works through a web interface served directly by the ESP32 over its own Wi-Fi access point. You connect your phone or laptop to the robot's Wi-Fi network, and a browser-based control panel opens automatically. From there you can switch the robot between sitting, standing, and walking forward or backward, adjust body height and tilt in real time, and fine-tune the calibration of each servo joint individually. All changes apply immediately without reloading the page. The hardware is built around a 3D-printed chassis from a Thingiverse design, a PCA9685 servo driver board that lets the ESP32 control many servos over a single connection, and any 12 servos that fit the leg dimensions. The README includes the specific physical measurements used by the inverse kinematics math and notes that these numbers need to be updated if you use a different chassis. The project was built mostly through vibe coding, meaning the author wrote it by iterating with an AI assistant. The code has been tested where possible, but the README is candid that the servo calibration system is not fully complete and recommends manually centering each servo to 90 degrees before assembly to avoid mechanical offset problems. Configuration and calibration values are saved to the ESP32's flash memory so settings persist between power cycles. The code is structured in separate modules for the robot logic, per-leg kinematics, the web server, and the embedded control page, so the Wi-Fi control layer can be replaced with a Bluetooth remote or RC receiver without changing the core movement code.