Introduction to KHR-1

This is the assembly story of the KHR-1 kit, recently introduced by the Japanese firm Kondo, famous for its Remote Control kit servos and equipment and sold by RoboSavvy. I believe that I may be one of the first (if not "the" first) westerner to have assembled this robot outside of Asia-Pacific. KHR-1 was designed to help users win Robo-One tournaments. In Robo-One tournaments you control your humanoid robot with a GamePad or JoyStick and fight against other humanoid robots. The rules of the competitions vary but they takes after martial arts tournaments.

The KHR-1 robot kit box is about 30x50x8cm (20x12x3inch) weighing about 1kg (2lb).

Dimensions of the KHR-1 Kit Robot box

The first thing you note when you receive the KHR-1 kit is how elegantly everything is wrapped up. Japanese aesthetics at its best. There are several little plastic bags with stuff underneath the exposed top part. These have labels that are referred to in the assembly manual to make it easier to find the different screws and wires.

 The servos are smaller then what I expected. If you are unfamiliar with RC (Remote Control) servos, they weigh quite a bit for a plastic box that size. Most of the weight obviously comes from the motor inside.

I went to the RoboSavvy web site and got the latest versions of documentation and software. Following Kondo's instructions, I came prepared with a toolbox.

KHR-1's manual is immaculately detailed. Even though the English translation is not always perfect, the faults are largely grammatical and the illustrations are very precise. One thing I found out is that every hint and phrase are important and reading every page again while constructing helps avoid having to redo stuff later on. This picturesque assembly process can accompany the manual but is not a replacement.

The first thing the manual says is "charge your batteries". The box came with a Japanese/US 110V charger but I also had a standard European power converter. Here on the right you can see the Japanese one and on the left there's the European one. 7.5V should supply more then 50mA. In fact, I was told by Kondo that I can use a higher voltage for a quick charge; up to 15V but the Amperage can go up pretty steeply. I'm not going to try that today but its good to know.

It is important with the universal power converter to make sure the tip is + or -. in this case the Japanese adapter had +, so I set the European with a positive tip as well.

The first thing to do on the way to assemble KHR-1 is to take out the screws from the servos and place some metal brackets around them. I used two drivers to do the screwing/unscrewing throughout the assembly process, depending on how tough the screws were dug in.

As I took out the screws, I took a look inside the KRS-784ICS servo. The front side had had a 4 gear reduction and lots of grease. The back side had a circuit that is of the new famed Kondo "Red Version" ICS family which takes the standard PWM input and but in addition, it allegedly has a unique function of being able to convey the current position and other parameters to the controller. The KHR-1 has 2 PIC based controller chips working together. Later we'll see more of that.