RoboSavvy - Head, Wires, CPU

Getting the little board with the led light into the head and then screwing the head onto the shoulder bracket was a bit of a challenge. In fact, we left these 4 screws half way because the amount of force required to get them all the way in was counterintuitive and since they are not seen anyway.. however, after the head-shoulder attachment saga, and attaching the two to the chest, we realized that two screws that attach the shoulder bracket to the chest, were left out. it meant dismantling the head again and looking ahead into the manual, at the work ahead of making all the wires look pretty, a quick executive decision was made to abandon two missing screws for the time being.

A special hole was created by the Robonova engineers to allow a screw-driver into the chest in order to attach the front panel with yet another PH/T 2x4mm screw. A magnetized screw driver was very helpful for this job.

How exciting! Robonova's body is complete. The process taught us one important lesson. It made us look in a different way at the many electronic devices and gadgets around the house. For the first time we kind of got a feeling of what it meant to work in one of those Chinese factories you read about where people get paid $1/day to screw, solder, weld and knit thousands of pieces of plastic, metal and cloths together. These $1/day workers, that are the substitute for expensive automation robots, are what allows us to enjoy modern commodity technology at ridiculously low prices.

Thanks to my experience with building the KHR-1, I didn't follow the instructions manual and tied all the wires neatly into place before actually switching on the robot to see if the servos were connected properly.

When the robot is switched on, it immediately gets into a standing initial position. There were two problems I encountered. The first problem was that half the servos didn't light up. These digital servos become very sturdy in their orientation when electricity is passed through them. The 9kg/cm torque that you see in the specs applies not only when the servo is turning but also when it is standing still. Hence when the right side of the robot's didn't show any objection to change, it was obvious that the servos were not connected to the controller board properly. The picture on the right is taken from the manual and for whatever reason I thought that the letter S stands for signal and hence the orientation of the connector is the same for left and right side servos. Wrong was I. The orientation of the connector on the right is 180° to its mate on the left and this makes sense if you look at the writings on the PCB where it depicts the position of the GND pin.
Once the connectors were turned all the motors buzzed. The Robonova servos buzz a bit quieter than the ICS784ICS servos that I have building the KHR-1.
The second problem was that the left foot turned into a crooked looking position (as in the picture above). This was a result of not following the instructions properly and setting the servo hone numbers to the wrong orientation.

OK, now that we are sure that the wires are connected properly to the controller board and that the basic orientation of all the servos is ok (calibration is obviously needed but the basic stand is almost perfect), we can get to the daunting task of tying the wires together neatly.

Here the objective was to somehow shove 3 of the long wires close to the controller board into the chest cavity. Seemed like an irritating challenge at the time as it involved unscrewing the controller board but it was done and the results are shown below if you skip a few pictures.

The rest of the work, probably 25% of the total amount, was about making the wires look pretty.

In the picture below you can see how the wires are tied together by cable ties.

The back cover in the pictures below is opened by loosening 4 screws. You can also see how some cables are tucked underneath the controller board.

There's also a transparent protective plastic cover for the unused top pins. Like with the KHR-1 where the whole back cover had to be hand-machined (with scissors) to snug the cables together, this plastic bit had to be scissored into shape in order to fit cozily onto the board and underneath the cool looking back cover.