That is indeed blackmarket servo wire that I had to get from ServoCity.
I opened up the cases, desoldered all of the leads, soldered on the flat ones, and then crimped on my own connectors.
It was a very timeconsuming and tedious project, but I do like how it came out.
I definitely don’t recommend trying it unless you’re both 1337 haxxor with an iron and as stubborn as a donkey.
Only think Nick is going to get out of people with a wiring job like that is other fools doing it as well. (I have 50’ of wire on its way, Plus I have to build my TTL cable).
It’s very very very tedious work, bud.
On my 5645’s, those darn little wires needed to be soldered onto surfacemount wire pads that were very close to each other.
And, to boot, the solder pads were lovingly nested within a minefield of SMT components, towards the middle of the board.
Why they couldn’t place the solder pads at the edge of the board or why they couldn’t use nice plated-through via’s instead of pads, I’ll never know.
I managed it with my Radioshack firestarter (woops, I mean soldering iron ), but I’d definitely suggest picking up a pencil soldering station.
There’s a cheap analog one that I’m buying from Sparkfun for about $70 bucks.
You might want to crack open one of your servos and peak in, before you get going.
If my 5645’s were a pain, my Mega Servo was a death warrant.
I skipped wiring that one, since the solder pads were under the PCB, which was innacessable because the motor was directly soldered to it.
A hot-air rework station would have been necessary to get that PCB out.
Just be sure that you’re geared up with loads of ESD protection before you start butchering your poor servos.
I under stand what they do it … They may have a multi layer board or one with a common ground in the center.
2nd if I need an Air Pencel I have a home made one that I can use.
Cost about 20.oo to make, granted not as nice as some of the other ones out there but … gideontech.com/content/articles/297/1 … it works.
it is not the 1st time that I did tight soldering (did it with a CVS camcorder and the Nokia LCD screen even tho that one was nice to have the holes).
but as always thanks for the advice … and I will take pictures as I work through one or more of them.
I spent yesterday getting the WiPort running.
As soon as it was, I set the biped down in my room and ran with my laptop to the opposite corner of the house.
With about 100 feet and 6 or so walls in between, I was still getting 2 out of 5 bars and was easily able to make the biped dance around at that range.
Soon, I’ll be getting the DIP breakout for the WiPort, so I’ll be able to throw everything on one board.
Right now, I’m using the COMPort Redirector for convenience’s sake, but I’m going to start fiddling around with some programs to eek the full performance out of this beast.
I have been running into an issue with the bot, though.
During group moves my huge 855 waist rotate briefly draws more current than the batteries can supply, effectively making the whole bot stutter a bit.
I’ve been experimenting with decoupling caps, but the largest I’ve got handy is a 220uF.
That bugger doesn’t seem to do the trick.
So, it looks like I’ll have to order a large cap or two for just this.
Anyone want to guess what value would be fine?
There’s no reason (other than physical dimensions, of course) that I shouldn’t get a really huge one, right?
Say… a few thousand uF?
Yay, good to hear it. Did you go with auto? Or get the IP values? 100 feet with 6 walls is REALLY good I would think. Thats an erm, very interesting mount for the WiPort. A few thousand uF O.o holy poopy, thats a lot of uF!
I grabbed the IP values.
Going auto-connect takes a lot of time to reconnect every time I power up the module.
Yes… I’m shooting for overkill, as usual.
As long as large capacities won’t hurt anything, I’m going to go with as big as it gets, while still fitting on the bot.
Mike, this here is a 56k sub-lightspeed connection.
I try to save videos for special occasions, like… say… actually getting this darn bugger to walk.