Tidying Up The Wires

And now for some final aesthetics. The objective of the next exercise is to tidy up the wires around the robot. For that purpose, the KHR-1 kit comes equipped with some designated grippers, washers, screws and bands.

The "2-6 BH Black Tapping" screw and the washer are placed as in the picture below and screwed onto the Servo Hones. Remember we had many cases of Servo Hones with only one screw. Here's the reason. The second point of attachment is completed by the Black screw & gripper. I found the missing Nickel screw that I thought I had lost, it was on the foot.

I followed the manual and got the foot's cable into the required position. For that, I had to disconnect the Servo extender momentarily.

The Black screws are a bit thinner then the Nickel ones and that caused a slight problem in a couple of cases. The Black screws are longer then the Nickel so they are able to take on the two sides of the Nylon Gripper and some aluminum bracket before digging into the Servo Hone's plastic surface. However, because (my guess) they are slightly thinner, they sometime don't have enough grip into the plastic in holes where I previously had a Nickel screw in and out a few times thus enlarging the hole. So in one case, where otherwise I'd have to screw  the gripper into a 3rd hole (picture on the left), I had to take off the Hone, roll it to the next vertical hole alignment, and push it back on exposing a fresh hole for the Black screw. This did the trick (picture on the right).

We put the grippers on the rest of the leg's Servos.

And the arm gets grippers too..

Symmetrically we put the grippers on the other side of the body.

The final object in the KHR-1 kit is a transparent plastic cover for the RCB-1 panels and serves as an enclosure for the many cables. I had to use scissors and a cutting knife to take off some bits.

The manual says that the grey areas (picture below) have to be cut off. This is not a straightforward chore because the plastic is quite thick.

At first glance, it seems a bit unlikely that all that wiring is going to fit into the transparent plastic container.

After analyzing it a bit, I noticed that actually the wires coming from the bottom part of the body can be be packed nicely. The problem was how to make sense of the 5 wires coming from the head and shoulders. These were pretty long and there should be a way to fit them into the cavity between the two boards. So first I removed the head's wire from the RCB-1, and rewired it so that it lays flat from the head onto the PCB base beneath it.

Then I folded the 4 sholder wires neatly onto the gap between the two RCB-1s.

Now everything seems to fit in nicely.

Finally, a little piercing was necessary to allow screwing the transparent cover onto the black PCB base.

The little opening exposes the serial port on the RCB-1 board this allows to easily plug and unplug the serial connector

This really was the final construction step.

By the way, you may have noticed that he is not standing in "Initial Position" but rather in a position called in the manual "Home Position". This position has the center of mass aligned throughout the head to the feet and gives this humanoid something that looks like.. a "bottom".