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11/04/14

Thursday 8 May 2014, by Eric P.


All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

Unpacking the beast

Well... it is as ugly as in the pictures :( OK, I admit that this advice is 100% subjective, and that it has not to be taken as a quality assessment. But honestly, I prefer a lot the kind of look used by the Q.bo for instance.

Mounting and connecting the RasPi backpack

All the connections are located under the robot base, which is a good idea with respect to the look. But it looks to much tinkered for a commercial product :

  • audio and power cable plugs interfere a bit because of their size and you have to stress them a bit to have them fully in place. Let’s hope this will not be detrimental to to board
  • power cable plug coming for the external power supply block is not correctly retained by its socket, and it easily unplugs when you manipulate the robot. Since you cannot really notice it, the battery will discharge since no more being charged while working with the robot.
  • you will have to strongly bend the cables if you want the robot correctly rest on its feet, and not half on front feet and other half on the cables
  • the on/off switch is very difficult to reach and actuate because it is really tiny and because the area is a bit crowded. It is very important to use it for turning off the robot, since it triggers the appropriate shutdown sequence at the Raspberry level

OK guys. So let’s start now and switch the power on.

It awakes and starts, but ends up by complaining that the battery is discharged. The documentation told that at least 4 hours of charge were required before the first use, but I tried anyway. So we will continue tomorrow.

In the meantime, we gently go to the Aisoy web site to register our new friend. Enter the serial id and validate. Bummer :( "Your serial id is invalid or has already been registered". Hey guys, this is the id printed on the label and the copy is supposed to be a brand new one. So what’s wrong ? A quick tour on the support forum revealed that I’m far from being the only guy to experiment this. Uh uh, bad feeling :/

Ok, let’s be Zen, and post a support request about the problem. But since we are on Saturday, I have no hope receiving any feedback before Monday, so test will be over for the week-end :( By "chance" I need to mow the lawn and get rid of a pile of chopped wood.

A bit later... (after the gardening sequence)

Surprise :) A reply from Aisoy support team is here. Kudos for them being very reactive and working even on week-ends. They inform me that they have entered the id in their database, and that all should be fine now.

Cool, I can advance to next step of the registration process, which displays the list of my Aisoys (only one for the moment) with a link for "opening its card". I click on it and get a new page, but which is a bit useless as is, although its legend explains that it is supposed to give access to some other functions and services. Not a single link or button on this page, only static texts and pictures. Ahem, it seems that this part of the system needs to be polished a bit...

As I have understood that this section of the web site is more oriented for people not willing to play with low level Linux related stuff, I put it aside for the moment, since anyway ssh is my best friend since a while now ;)

To be continued...

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