Jonecia Keels' blog

June 2-13

The first step in building the Manoi AT01 is to connect the servos to certain wires (depending on length). Eventually all of the wires are going to be connected to the motherboard. My collegue and I labeled the wires with stickers which indicate which servo a specific wire is connected to. For example the wire with servo #5 will have a #5 sticker placed on it. We do this so when it is time to connect the wires to the appropiete pins on the motherboard, it will be easier to identify. Even though the Manoi manual was in Japanese, there were pictures on each page so it was possible for us to understand each step in building the robot. If I got stuck, I used a translator online to try and understand what the next step was. I ran into a few problems. We accidently screwed in the foot backwards. While trying to unscrew the foot, the screw head became stripped . The screws that came with the Manoi is not exactly of good quality. So our building was delayed for about 5 days and we spent that time trying to get the screw out. We finally managed to unscrew it and we continued bulilding. We finished building the legs, body, arms, and head. We then started attaching all of the limbs together. And here comes problem #2: we screwed in the legs backwards . Imagine your knees bending the opposite way….yea that’s what our robot did. So we had to carefully unscrew the screws to turn the legs around. Imaginary beads of sweat were running down my face while I slowly and steadily unscrewed the legs. Thank goodness I got the screws out with minimal difficulty. For the meantime we are about 75% done with the hardware aspect of building the robot.

Progress of Manoi thus far