The box and head sensor module are inside..
The head sensor contains the Sharp infrared distance sensor and the infrared
remote-control sensor. The default head that comes in the box only contains the
remote-control infrared. However, it provides a good amount of space that can
be enough to fit a miniature camera such as the HaViMo module.
Package contains lots of plastic bags with screws, connectors, wires and other “stuff”
inside. The documentation is surprisingly well presented in a book in English
and in Colour!
Among the things in the box is a screw driver (Made In Japan) and a small infrared remote
control.
The two types of servos in the box have same shell.
Very curious to see the magic inside these Megarobotics servos. So out go the 4
screws.
Atmega8 drivers the servo and on the right, the exposed I/O pad. In the servo manual,
this pad is described and there is one A2D interface 0-5V going into one of the
Atmega8 pins) and 2 digital IO ports from the Atmega8 are also exposed. This
gives the unusual feature of being able to connect a gyro or any other analog
or digital sensor to the servo and read its values using the Robobuilder serial
protocol which is documented rigorously in the servo manual. This means no need
to hack a sensor board!!
The servo casing has a small cover that can be removed to exposed the IO ports
permanently.
Here’s how the servo looks with the solder I/O pads exposed. How very well thought out!
Now I want to see the gears. So following the instructions in the Robobuilder site
(document in Korean but all pictures so no worries), a little bit of pressure
with the screwdriver and the top part of the servo detaches.
Spectacular engineering (compared to standard RC servo technology)..
The controller board has many through-holes and solder pads that are yet to be
identified. It also has more capacitors than I’ve seen before for a hobby
robot.
So now after satisfying our curiosity regarding the innards of this robot, we follow
the instructions in the manual.
The penatagon shaped fittings help you find the correct fitting position very
easily.
Construction is pretty straightforward. Total of about net less than 2 hours. This is
incredible compared to KHR-1 (10 hours), KHR-2HV (8 hours), Robonova (7 hours),
Bioloid (4-6 hours), Manoi (14 hours with shell work).
Assembling the lower leg parts was the only time where we found a little difficulty. You
need to fit two servos into the plastic part and they are very tight. In order
to succeed you need to fit the servos and place the screws, but do not fasten
the bolts. Only fasten the bolts once both servos are fitted and the screws are
inserted.
The manual skips the step where you need to attach the chest cover. It’s quite easy to
understand when to do it but still the manual skips it.
There is a lot of space inside the chest cover and between the servos of the arms. This
means it’s quite easy to fit and additional battery, board, etc in the robot.
The controller simply slides and locks into place. The daisy chain system means
that you only need to connect 5 cables to the controller: one for each arm and
leg and one for the head.
The CD contains some videos for assembly troubleshooting. That was thoughtful because
we made both mistakes. Both arms and legs were fitted incorrectly and had to be
disconnected and reattached. Nothing serious.. took a total of 5 minutes.
The easy-assembly system helped a lot in fixing the problem. We just needed to
remove two screws on each leg and arm and put them in the correct position.
The join-insert assembly system is a really nice feature. It reduces the number of
bolts needed to hold servo pairs in place and makes assembling and transforming
the robot a lot easier and faster than we’ve seen in other kits.
Every joint fits into place and then is re-enforced with one or two screws to make sure the
joint stays in place under stress.
The plastic joint parts also seem to have a very good quality and capable of absorbing a
lot of stress.
Once assembled, the robot is pre-programmed to respond to the Remote Control. You
can have it walking back and forth, turn left and right and punch left and
punch right.
The special buttons make the robot do a front flip and back flip.
Statistics: Posted by limor — Thu Jul 10, 2008 2:40 pm
]]>