The first thing I did was to play around with the Android app. Yes, I know it’s lame to play like a kid at my age but it was a lot of fun watching the robot dancing and falling down so many times…

The next thing was to sit down and think if the current hardware (the “CPU”) is enough for what I want to do, even if I don’t have yet a very clear idea of what I want to do. The options are:

  1. Replace the OpenCM controller by something more powerful and generic. Here the best options are:
    1. Arduino
    2. BeagleBone (I have some experience because we use it in my lab to control the air flow to the soft hands we build)
    3. Raspberry PI
  2. Keep working with the OpenCM, even if it is so limited in terms of computational power and memory space.

While digging into the code examples for the OpenCM I found a piece of code that allows to send commands and receive feedback from the USB connector of the board. Voilá! I made a decision! I will keep for now the OpenCM, program it to receive commands and send feedback over the USB and use my computer to carry the heavy load. In this way I could even mount on the robot a “real” camera (the color sensor that is available for the robot is rather a joke) and connect it to my computer, too. Another reason to keep the OpenCM is that the other options would imply to get to know how to program and control the motors using a different board, which is not what I want to focus on.

Once I decided on this, my next step was to connect with the OpenCM board using a mini USB. To do that I needed to cut a hole on the front part of the robot torso because the mini USB connector is hidden there.

In the next post I will report on the first steps programming Kuroki.