Robi Robot Kit

[Tetsuwan Penguin]

I've watched the Kirobo videos, and also seen the web page for the Robi Robot kit (which is sold out for now). The company has a series of videos on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT8zelujHlw that show how to assemble the kit.

While it is in Japanese, the video is very well done and you can see exactly how the thing goes together without having to understand the language at all. Actually I found it funny how many English words and phrases they have adopted, such as "servo motor", "servo cable", "battery case", "servo tester", "cover" were all in English with a thick Japanese accent!

I was curious just how the servos were connected to the arms and legs to achieve movement, and how many degrees of movement they provided. I'm up to part 10 so far in which the head was assembled and attached to the upper body, and one arm from the hand to the elbow was built up.

I'm wondering if I can reverse engineer a rough idea of the assembly and then cast parts in aluminum to build a working R/C model. It would take learning how to use 3D cad software (there are some open source programs for this). I had started to build a foundary furnace to cast small parts in aluminum, this would be a good project for that.

In any case, the videos are interesting to watch if you're curious about Kirobi.