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Project M: MANOI AT01 Progress Report #4

It's already the middle of the week here in Japan, and for us that means that almost all of our attention has to be focused on our 'day-job' that pays the rent and keeps food on the table. Nevertheless, we did manage to carve out a few minutes last night to make some more progress on the assembly of our new MANOI AT01 robot from Kyosho.

We're going to be totally honest even though we don't have to be. After some close inspection and self-QC, we discovered that we had the cables for the servos in the robots feet routed the wrong way around.

Once again, in our excitement and rush to complete the assembly (and start playing with our new toy) we hadn't paid close enough attention to the illustrations in the manual.

Thankfully, and thanks to the way that Kyosho and Kondo designed the robot, it was a piece of cake to fix.

We unscrewed the foot/sole plates (4 screws/plate), then removed the bracket from the foot servo to reroute the cable, then put it all back together. Fixing our error on both feet took less than 5 minutes, though obviously it would have been better to avoid from the beginning. At some point, perhaps after the assembly is finished, we should post about the tools we used for the assembly.

Here's a photo of the leg assemblies.

Kyosho provides stick-on labels with the servo designations as a part of the kit, but we decided to use yellow Post-it notes during this part of the process and then replace them with the good labels later since we want the finished robot to look as professional as possible. The Post-it notes should also help us keep the different assemblies straight in our mind to avoid further errors. For example, "Left" means the robot's left, not our left, so we put yellow "Left" and "Right" stickers on the assemblies.

Compared to earlier robot kits on the market, the MANOI AT01 clearly shows that the designers paid attention to even the smallest details. A good example is the cable routing brackets shown in the photo above.

Okay, so our cable routing doesn't look quite as pretty or professional as the manual drawing of the same leg assembly on the left. And, we should have taken a little more time to position the leg servos to exactly match the drawing. Still, we're pretty happy with the progress made so far and have definitely started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It won't be long now before our new robot is running around, or at least walking. It's a good thing because Kyosho has started to upload sample motion files to their website and is encouraging MANOI owners to contribute their own creations so that everyone can enjoy them.

More to come...

Related links:

Project M: MANOI Posts (English)

Kyosho MANOI AT01 Official Website (Japanese)

Posted by Lem on September 6, 2006 | Permalink | Email this post

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