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All posts for the month July, 2019

Animabot Rev3 – Mecha – Parts are on the way !

Posted by Emmanuel Sichet on 30/07/2019
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Good news ! The body parts are done and on the way ! I’m really exited to see how Animabot will come along once assembled. For the moment, I’m still writing and testing the drivers of the Motherboard and testing all components…. So hopefully, within few weeks I will finish this, send a new motherboard to production and integrate it.

Now, let’s enjoy the beauty of SLA 3D printing with smooth finish :

Big Puzzle
Upper Body
Lower & Upper Body Interior
Some internal parts
Lower Body

He is gonna be AWESOME !!!!

Animabot Rev3 – Hardware – Motherboard

Posted by Emmanuel Sichet on 27/07/2019
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I finally received the rest of the components for the motherboard ! took me some hours to populate everything (QFN packages take a bit of time to solder when you are not used to 😀 )The smoke test passed for the Power supplies (7.6V, 5V) but I still have to test the battery charger… which gives me a bit of apprehensions because I don’t want to fry my battery :/

I will definitely have to make an improved version in the next few weeks to fix the following issues:

  1. Lack of thermal exchange for the PSU controller and MOSFET
  2. Change from 10DOF IMU board to a 9DOF IMU (LSM9DS1TR)
  3. Separate I2C bus for the Eyes (they use too much bandwidth forth rest of the sensors)
  4. Overall Routing & Layout improvements
  5. More detailled SilkScreen

But first I have to finish testing all the features and components to see if further modifications are required. But for now I’m pretty happy with the result, no big trouble. I did some thermal test and the PSU is around 40°C in idle mode without cooling and 35°C when the fan is active, even so the thermal dissipation of the component in not ideal and the fan is powered at 3V3 instead of 5V.

Motherboard in progress

As mentioned, I still have the rest of the features to test (around 15: Telemeter, Bluetooth, Charger, Raspberry Pi communication, Servos, etc…) so stay tune 🙂

Animabot Rev3 – Mecha – Leg Sample

Posted by Emmanuel Sichet on 15/07/2019
Posted in: Animabot Rev3, Mecha. Tagged: , , , . 9 Comments

The mechanical design is finished since few weeks, but I have been waiting some sample of the leg to check the tolerances, quality and color. This sample allowed to check the passage of the cable in the Coxa, the Tibia Cap (anti-slippery pad), servo mounting, etc..

I’m glad I ask I did that before the complete manufacturing because I found several issues. The passage for the cable needed to be deeper to protect it, the Pad was too small to hold in place properly and the color did not satisfied me totally… I’m still waiting for some more sample to compare and chose the final color !

 

Hopefully the samples will arrive soon, so I can order all the parts to assemble Animabot !