A small shipment from Jaycar has arrived, which gives the greenlight to more work on the Bioloid kit. Things kinda got stalled when I bought a new laptop without any COM1 port and moved all my bot controlling s/w there :{ ; but situation has now been fixed.

Elsewhere I’ve been checking through the Kondo KHR2 kit and trying to make sense of the bits of the doc that are still in Japanese. It’s slow going (since I have a record of wrecking things if I act in haste but a few of the preliminaries are complete. But questions remain.

The KHR2 came in 4 boxes. It looks, at present, that the "blue box" contains a set of redundant parts — an extra RC transmitter and receiver, a USB-serial converter, antennas, and leads. All these appear in other boxes as well. Oh well, extra parts never hurt anyone…

Box #1 (the basic bot) is now spread over my living-room floor. The first few steps from the manual seem to be pull the bolts from the 17 servos and label all wires and servos. Only 4 servos are distinguished  in that they have extra-long leads, otherwise  the labelling process can work blind.

The kit provides tags (and even wire guides!) for all the control wires as well as the servos. These details were something I missed working on the Joinmax doggie.

The RC controller and a USB-serial link have been assembled from the bits (bag "K") and the next step appears to be to verify the controller works on a couple of servos.

The board doesn’t seem to contain too much intelligence, but I’ve noticed it has room for a bit of expansion — only 17 of the 24 servo channels are presently used as well as only 1 of the 3 RC channels.

From the home-made macroscope:

Front:

Back:

Yet elsewhere, eBay buying has stung me again. Some fella sold me 3 "color" spycams, but it turns out 2 of them are B&W. That tussle is just starting.