Gizmosmith

Robosapien Repairs

I got a Robosapien V2 on Craigslist for very short money, and started working on turning it into a robot. This doesn’t interfere with my other projects because the stuff I’m using to robotify it is the same codebase I’ll be using for brain hacks at Defcon and and a drink dispensing robot at future festivals. But I digress.

On powering it up, the Robosapien complained about a “low brain battery” and turned itself off. When I replaced the batteries, it failed to do anything at all. I checked a few forums, and it turns out that the problem is the wire insulation failure that struck a lot of the Robosapien V2s. The problem is that the insulation on some of the wires, particularly the ones that are single strands, rather than part of multi-wire cables, is bad. It becomes brittle and crumbly, and then flakes off when the robot moves. This causes the batteries to short out, and die quickly, if you are lucky. If you are not lucky, the Robosapien melts or catches fire.

In my Robosapien, the affected wires appear to be confined to the leg wiring harness, particularly the motor wires, battery leads, and wires from the foot switch PCB to the main PCB. To fix this, I’m going to extract the wires, and replace them with un-crappy ones. It’s kind of a tedious job, but I am actually kind of looking forward to it as a way to unwind at the end of the day. Have a beer, replace a bunch of wires, chill out.