davidko
Hello! I’m David Ko; I’m the CTO of Barobo and I helped design and program the Linkbot 
Just wanted to say I am very impressed by this blog post!
There are a couple of things that I would like to add:
- The battery is a Lithium-Ion battery; not LiPo
- The PCB board with the buttons (which we call the USB board) can control power to the main PCB board. Power is routed from the battery to the USB board back to the Main-board. When the robot is in an “off” state, there should be close to zero current flow from the battery; The only current flowing would be whatever tiny amount leaking through transistors. When the power button is depressed, it supplies power to the USB chip. When the USB chip detects that it has been on for about a second, only then does the USB chip supply power to the main board, which contains the ATMEGA128RFA1, motors, etc, which is when the robot begins to boot up (flashes its red LED). The red flashing LED is actually the Arduino boot loader starting up, and it is during this time when you can communicate with the bootloader on the main board through the USB/serial port to re-flash the robot.
Feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions!
Regards,
David