limor wrote:
There is no single "best". Each one is unique and a the outcome of years of careful planning of the smallest details.
There is no single "best". Each one is unique and a the outcome of years of careful planning of the smallest details.
Rubbish! There is only One True Way.
Seriously though, I'm also a newbie, and have been asking for a lot of advice, and almost always get these carefully balanced it's-all-good type answers, which I found rather aggravating. I'd rather people took a stand; I'm quite capable of deciding which stands make the most sense to me.
So, in that spirit, I'll take one:
The Kondo and Hitec robots are actually the outcome of years of being entrenched in the R/C (radio-controlled) vehicle market. Those servos have a certain form factor (e.g. an output shaft on only one side) and feature set (e.g. limited rotational range, one-way communication) that made sense for that market, but make no sense whatsoever for use in robotics. These old servo manufacturers are ever-so-slowly being dragged into the 21st century when it comes to robotics, but their products are still square pegs in round holes — an awkward fit at best.
Robotis, on the other hand, was founded as a robotics company, and their servos were designed as robot servos right from the get-go. They have just about everything you'd want for use in a robot: they're daisy-chainable, speak a simple serial protocol, provide lots of feedback on what's going on inside the servo, they can do both continuous rotation (think wheels) as well as position control over 300 degrees, etc.
If you were going to start from scratch and design a servo for robotics, I hold that you'd come up with something very much like the Bioloid (Robotis) servos and not at all like the Hitec or Kondo servos. I also predict that, within a few years, Hitec and Kondo will either get with the program or (dare I say it?) get squeezed out of the robotics market. It's much like the early days of personal computers — you can get away with a sucky product only as long as some young upstart doesn't come along and show people how it should be. That's just what Robotis has done.
Oh, and Bioloid is substantially cheaper for the power too. A 16 kg-cm AX-12 servo (plus a couple of brackets!) is $45. The closest Hitec equivalent is about $115 — despite lacking all those cool features you want in a robot servo. (Not sure about Kondo prices, as they're hard to find in the U.S.) The kits you mention are comparable in price only because the Hitec (and to lesser extent, the Kondo) models are using servos just barely strong enough for the job.
So, my advice is, go with Bioloid. It's a better product and a better value. So there!
Cheers,
- Joe
P.S. Those whose views differ, please don't start a flame war — but feel free to post your own perspectives!
Statistics: Posted by Joe — Wed Nov 22, 2006 5:41 am
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