Testing

The battery enters into Robonova's nether-region. A nice touch was the rubber protector that stops the battery cord from getting torn by the rough aluminum edges. Here's something I bet was probably required for the CE approval.

The European Robonova comes with a very generous Multicharger set. Not only does it have all the standard electricity plugs, but it also has the ability to connect to a car cigarette lighter socket (also available in American-Airlines business-class seats, though insisting on bringing your robot on board may get you delayed at security..).

The charger also has an indicator that shows when the charging is complete.

Charging takes about an hour and the three software systems RoboBASIC, RoboScript and RoboRemocon were downloaded from http://robonova.de and installed.

The first thing to be done with the software is actually setting the default controller type with the RoboBASIC software menu. Set → Controller Type → MR-C3024 Serial

The second thing is calibrating the robot's Zero Position. Again, using the menu you select Compile → Set Zero Point and the following screen appears. Pressing on the little red and blue arrows moves the robot's servos in real-time. You start buy pressing READ which takes the current values into the PC, play around with the arrows and then press WRITE which will set this position as Zero Position.

The final step of this initial introduction with Robonova was to run a couple of programs and see the robot do cool stuff. For some reason the using roboBasic with one of the many motion sequences available on the CD, didn't work the first time. So we used the roboScript and the robot did its thing with panache.

This was a short summary of our 7 hour adventure that spread over 4 evenings building the robot and documenting the process. Robonova is certainly an evolution from KHR-1 but KHR-1 still has it's Japanese charm an honorary position of being the first to market (in fact it won an excellence award in February 2006).

Robonova-1 and KHR-1 are not intended to be used by children under 14. The aluminum brackets attached to 9kg/cm servos can easily cause harm to a child's fingers if proper care is not taken to prevent fingers entering in the robot's way.

Over the weeks to come, I'll be spending time learning how to program it and try to make it climb some stairs cause I haven't seen any videos of Robonova or KHR-1 climbing stairs. So this challenge should be fun to conquer and I'll post the results on the RoboSavvy forum.