I remember a couple of weeks ago, you mentioned that you were thinking of building some brackets to allow people to use the Bioloid servos, which I believe you are planning to sell.
I think this will be great! My question is what controller board are you planning on using? The stock one from Robotis? Or the ArbotiX controller from Vanadium Labs (sold by Trossen), which has XBee and a footprint of 2.8"x2.8". Or are you thinking of building/adapting one of your own?
Just wondering.
Kurt
I haven’t put enough time into researching it. I was thinking the Botboarduino, but it might need an adapter? I dunno…
Sounds good. I think it would probably be best to be an Arduino Mega.
My quick look through the ArbotiX controller, think it may be fine for a hacker type, but I am not sure I would use it for general purposes.
It is based on the Atmega644P which has two USARTS. They use the 2nd USART for controlling the robotis servos. I believe they simply tied both RX and TX to the data pin going to the servos, without any additional hardware to convert full duplex into half duplex. Probably not a big deal. But likewise it should not be hard to create an adapter or shield…
The first USART they use for the XBee. They do not have any serial connector or interface built in to the board. They do have a 4 or 5 pin connector setup to plug in a Sparkfun USB to serial breakout board. To program the board you need to get one of these or they recommend getting an ISP adapter to program the board, as if you wish to do it using the serial connector, you must first unplug the XBee…
They do provide I believe 16 3 pin servo type headers, where 8 of them can be analog. But I believe that all of these are tied to +5v, so you can not use them for servos. They also have a 2 DC motor setup (1 Amp each) which could be nice.
Please don’t get me wrong, this is probably a very nice board for what they were wanting, but I was just interested in getting a jump on understanding if this would be a good GP board.
Kurt
P.S. - Zenta, did you ever receive yours?
Kurt
Hi Kurt,
No, I’ve not received my prize yet… 
But I bought the ArbotiX board and a bioloid comp kit several years ago. Have not had time to play with it though. But when I started looking at the ArbotiX board I wondered how I should be able to do any debugging on the code with the two UART’s occupied with servo bus and XBee connected to a remote ctrl. An additional UART could probably be convenient. Didn’t one of your Mega boards have 4 of them?
I don’t think they shipped when he said or you would have had it long ago. It only takes a couple of days. Wow…
Have they stopped having competitions?
Hi Zenta and Jim,
Yep, I remember seeing your post up on Trossen 3 weeks ago (forums.trossenrobotics.com/showt … #post49339) It sounded then like Andrew just completed assembling 20 of the kits and yours would be the first to ship… Sorry to hear that you still have not received it.
Several years ago, I thought about buying the bioloid kit as I liked the puppy, but then went with the CHR-3, which has been a real workhorse! That is when I decided I really was not that interested with the Robonova (which is still collecting dust).
Yep the ArbotiX board has the XBee on the first USART, which more or less implies that you don’t have a serial port to output debug information to. This is also true with many of the XBee shields for Arduinos. As you mention, it is a reason I really like the Mega’s as they do have 4 USARTS, which we do bring out in our shield. Should not be hard to build a simple board that takes 1 or 2 input pins (RX/TX) plus Power and Ground and have a few of the Bioloid type connectors, that you can plug into. I would guess is there are probably some boards out there already…
Side note: .3 version of Botboarduino Mega Shield is scheduled to ship tomorrow 
Kurt
Do I smell a Robotis AX/RX shield ? 
Yes, having more than 2 USART’s would certainly help.
I got a PM from Andrew Thursday last week that he had my prize ready. But I’m trying to do a deal by replacing the AX-12 with AX-18…
