I’ve managed to get about 1/2 the Joinmax doggie going.

A minor break-through happened when I realised the instructions that came with the kit were only a rough guide even though it seemed to use the same part numbers and some of the hand-drawn pix kinda looked like what I expected.

Anyway, throwing the 13-page (a tip-off, I’d say) thing away and using native cunning, the little fella was wagging his tail (not presently attached to his body and wiggling his legs inside a couple hours.

The bot is remote-controlled via an RS232 cable. The instructions didn’t say what the line parameters were — although they did tell you the messages were 3-bytes long giving a header (0xff), the motor number (as a byte), and the position code (as a byte).

But running the supplied interface program (just a means of recording all the position numbers for the 15 servors and playing it back at various speeds — no, not an animation tool under wine emulation on my Linux box showed it was setting COM1 to 9600 baud, 1 stop bit and no parity (as you’d probably guess).

A purpose-built interface to my planner program isn’t too far away.

While the Joinmax tool did work for a while, something went wrong — perhaps with the emulation — and the servos on my new pal started to whine and move around in erratic ways. A few quick disconnects of the battery pack were needed, and I hope none of the servos are any the worse for wear.

So here are some pix.

Doggie sleeping or after having been hit by one of the wheel-bots (one is spinning around the room in the bg, top):

Yes, there are mess of wires in a tiny space, but they provided cable ties in the kit!

After some careful editing of the motor playback script using the provided tool, doggy is up to his old tricks:

NAUGHTY DOGGIE! No extra charge for YOU tonight!