Ahhh. Some deliveries have finally come in.

Not only is a Bioloid kit sitting around for me to play with — but still awaiting a USB-to-serial converter so it’ll run on the new laptop — but a Kondo KHR-2HV turned up over the past few days (kept missing the delivery guy who wanted his 250 in GST and handling charges).

The "starter kit" that I got through Trossenrobotics comes in 4 boxes. It seems to include pretty much everything for small-scale humanoid robot experiments (and I’m mainly interested in the movement control at this point, rather than vision processing & sucklike) including wifi control, 1 gyro, the 17 dof bot (lots of nice hi-precision aluminium frames), and a plastic outer "suit" so it doesn’t get around nekkid.

While all the original doc is in Japanese, some has been translated by Trossen (/customers?) so at least I can get the basic bot built. Some of the other navigating will have to be from the pix only.

At my level of experience, the construction is unusual in that the frames actually need the servos to be pulled apart first. They use the long bolts from the servos to hold most of the frames on.

I don’t know what the characteristics of the servos are like (KRS788HV digitals)  yet, but they are non-networked and allegedly high-precision std size devices.

(Update 27 Sep: seems the ICS in the document relates to position feedback. Some talk on Robosavvy also indicates the units can be programmed with 3 parameters sets and automatically swap between them. It’s claimed each servo can act as a collission detector). 

The "heart 2 heart" s/w that runs the demos and motion devel programming appears to be an extension of the "record all servo positions" idea, rather than anything like animation. The on-bot controller seems to be otherwise just a servo controller with a small amount of intelligence to limit positions and initialise to a standard position.

Elsewhere, a shipment of servos from Pololu has come in, and it seems they’ve added at least 1 thing I didn’t explicitly order — a dual DC motor control. But all these odds and ends will have to wait a while while I tinker with the "big" kits.