Took another swing through the city shops yesterday, collecting handtools. I’d previously cornered the market in powered screwdrivers; now I think I have a good-enough collection of side cutters.

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Various things have been arriving through the parcel post, so I also have a growing backlog of things to open, test and even build.

My first Bioloid is up — OK, example 1 from the Quickstart Guide — but it looks like a while before I’ll be able to set down and build anything substantial.

My impression of the Robotis kit is still very positive, but after you’ve been playing with things for a few hours you begin to see the small things that need to be fed back into someone’s TQMS; except I won’t.

My first problem was the "inserting the nuts" problem. The kit is based on 2 mm nuts and bolts. The CM-5 controller usually sits in a box (it can also just be screwed to the outside of the box) to which the various limbs of bots are attached. And the attachment involves slipping at least 2 2mm nuts into slots which are lined along each edge of the box.

Now slipping these little things into the little slots is not quite as easy as it might sound. You don’t want to hammer them in with the end of needle-nosed pliers. Because — (a) that’s not a neat solutions, and (b) it scratches the nuts and that’s not neat!

After I developed my own technique of cleaning off excess gunk inside the slots with a toothbrush and rolling these things in using the end of a small phillips screwdriver I noticed on the CD in the kit they had a movie of pretty-much the same thing. Problem solved!

The next niggle was the seating of nuts in the servo horns. There are 4 of threaded holes in there to attach various to-be-made-mobile brackets. But it turns out some of them are too deeply seated away from the front face of the horn to be reached by the usual 10×2mm bolts. Of course, 15×2mm bolts are too long and dig into the front of the servo.

Typically, it seems, the nut nearest the "reference mark" is too far down to reach through the 2-3 mm-deep hole of most brackets.

Here’s a picture or 2 of what I’m babbling about. The pix show 4 bolts just sitting at the depth of the embedded nuts — I haven’t screwed them in at all. You’ll notice the bolt on the far left appears 10-20% deeper than all the others.

So the solution to this niggle seemed to be to get each of the servos (and there are 18 in the kit) and do a test-connect to a simple bracket and make sure all the nuts are seated right.

With those little pieces, my aging eyes (yes, I’ve invested in several mag glasses, lighted mag glasses, etc — but the best to date is a bicycle lamp hot-glued to an old sweat band and mounted on the front of my forehead), and my 5-thumb mits (see pix for obvious proof of this claim) this procedure took quite a while.

But I had enough energy left over to start on page 1 of the "quickstart" and make a railroad crossing gate. I figure the hand-eye exercise will do me good in the long run.

Some pix. Gate is down:

Bing, bing, bing, bing… Gate is up:

(I didn’t realise these were quite as dark as they are — they looked OK on the laptop!)

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And, finally, I managed to get some work done on the first kit I bought. It’s been kinda sitting on a shelf back there in the workshed because it looked so fiddly to get to go.

Essentially, the Talrik Jr Pro is a box of bits & pieces that you’re meant to cobble together pretty-much on your own. There is a written guide, but it looks like it was written so long ago, some of the "guiding" parts are no longer exactly true of current (e.g.) servos.

You’re meant to attach the wheels  provided by screwing them to the servo horn. The wheels are (say) 15 mm thick at the rims and you have to centre the whole thing exactly else the power the servos dish out will not overcome any wobbles.

You can hot glue the horn to the inside of the wheel, but this also might suffer from mis-alignment. There’s about a 1 mm diff between the inside of the wheel rim and the round horn provided. (The kit also comes with about a dozen other horns, mostly useless unless highly modified).

But maybe that’s the Zen of this kit — getting over all the little problems. When you find the holes pre-cut in the platsic body of the bot are about 2 mm away from the hole positions in the servos that are meant to bolt in there — you get over it. When you find not enough 15mm bolts are provided to do the bolting anway (obviously need 8 for the 2 wheel servos, but the kit has only 6 — and I’ve used 4 of those to mount the controller on the top plate because the other 10 mm screws are not long enough to do the job and provide the 3 mm clearance required between the back of the controller — components are mounted back there! — and the surface of the mounting plate, well, you’re meant to get over it.

So the struggle is long, if you’re at all fussy and want to do a neat job. I’m not as fussy as some, but maybe I’m too picky, anway.

So far the Talrik project is about 1/4 finished. Some pix follow. They show the initial construction of the bumper ring, the assembly of the top plate, and the more-or-less outline of the finished bot without its wheels.

Talrik is about 7" in diam, and about 3" tall, on its 2.5" diam wheels. It’s powered by a home-build NiCd pack and controlled by a 6811A board from Mekatronix.

I can hardly wait till it comes to trying to download its  firmware over the experimental and  mostly undocumented  USB link.

Bumper ring:

Top plate with 6811 board mounted with 4 of the provided 15 mm screws:

A bit more hardware attached to the top plate. Wiring to be done when I have energy — you have to make the connectors and wire harness out of bits and pieces provided; a bit of a chore for me.

Finally, top plate attached to battery & servo box. Wheels yet to be hot-glued (or otherwise) on: