lampcov wrote:
Now if only there was someone who read this board, and was in Japan and might be kind enough to let you use their address......
I'm kind, but not that kind... 
Being responsible for importing/exporting and other people's electronic components is something I would definitely like to avoid. The place to start would be with the distributor that you bought the robot/RCB3 from. At this point, they may not know since the update seminar that I attended last Sunday was pre-release and limited to a maximum of 15 people.
To answer some of the questions already raised-
1- It's not a mandatory upgrade - if you're happy with the robots performance then you might want to wait a bit before upgrading to see if there are any bugs or problems.
2- The reason for the upgrade is added functions and features rather than bug fixes.
3- All motions/scenarios/settings (including gyro settings) need to be backed up before the upgrade since all data on the chip will be erased by the new firmware installation.
4- Existing motion sequences will need to be modified to work with the new firmware. The primary reason is the improved processing speed of branch objects (SET) will throw motion sequence timing off. The new RCB3 documentation goes through this in some detail (Japanese).
5- The original H2H3 and the H2H3J applications will not work correctly with the upgraded firmware - they don't support the new functionality. There's a new H2H3 version for use with the upgraded boards.
This implies that at least for now you wouldn't be able to use the English version of the software with an upgraded board since the only English version is for H2H3J.
In my particular case, I had one board upgraded and kept my other one untouched just in case I had to revert back to the original configuration.
Some of the other people in the seminar were really hot to try out the new firmware immediately, so I'm sure they will be posting about it on their blogs very soon. Actually, at the end of the seminar when they first started showing off the upgraded RCB3 in the modified KHR-1HV in the video clip, everyone burst into applause.
My schedule's pretty hectic, so it will probably be a week or two before I can free up the time to reinstall the board and start playing with it. I'll blog about what I find on Robots Dreams, of course. 
Statistics: Posted by tempusmaster — Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:38 am
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