Jonecia Keels' blog

June 14-16
Ok so this past Saturday my colleague pointed out that the right arm on the robot was flipped upside down causing one of the arms to be higher than the other . If you look at my last posting and the picture of the robot you can see how the right arm is lower than the left….yes robots are very TEDIOUS….I think that is my quote for the summer…anyways so I had to unscrew the whole arm in order to get to the base of the servo and switch it around. This surprisingly went quite well and I was able to fix it. Now it looks better than ever . The next day I reconnected the wires to the appropriate pins on the motherboard. Afterwards I installed the Manio’s software, called Heart to Heart, so that I was able to connect and assign channels to certain servos (limbs and joints) on the robot. The Heart to Heart software only runs on Windows and I have a MacBook. So I installed Parallels with Windows XP and it runs smoothly. There is 17 degrees of freedom on the Manoi. It is very flexible. It can even do a split. Our next task is to assign a ‘home position’ for the Manoi. Every time we turn on the Manoi we want it to automatically go to a certain posture, which is the ‘home position’. We want the Manoi to automatically stand up. The software is not really user friendly but we hope to understand it fully by the end of this week.

Fixed Manoi…Check out the Even Arms =)

Heart to Heart Software…Notice the channels and the slide bar…this will eventually control the servos and joints on the Manoi

This is the Motherboard. The wires that are connected to the servos are all connected to certain pins on the motherboard. If you look closely there are extra pins for adding your own features. We are going to utilize this to add a camera to the Manoi.