Take Over the Wold Already

Published on 2018-06-10 in Kubik M0.

I decided to take all that I have learned in the recent years with all the versions of  Tote and other projects, and turn it into a robot kit to sell on Tindie. While the previous work focused on making it as simple as possible to build it yourself and possibly modify the design, this time I’m going to focus on optimizing for a kit. The design will be much more integrated, with all that can be done in advance already done. I’m going to optimize for the cost, ease of production, shipping, ease of assembly, robustness, and fun. Of course I still want to make it easy to hack and extend, but that is going to be a secondary concern.

Optimizing for cost and ease of production means that the development boards, as used in SpiderWing and D1 Mini Tote have to go — not only they add to cost, but also they increase the risks, because I don’t have any guarantee they will still be available in two years in reasonable prices. So it has to be a single integrated circuit board, with a minimal amount of through-hole parts, with all the parts on one side, and fitting in either the 5x5cm or 10x10cm limit.

Optimizing for shipping means that it can’t be sold assembled — the box would simply be too big. So the kit has to be flat, preferably less than 2cm. There is no chance I’m going to ship a battery, so it has to use a standard battery that is easy to get. And the servos are simply too heavy to ship, so that will need to be sourced separately too.

Ease of assembly means that everything has to be pre-soldered. Soldering is not hard, but requires specialized tools and people are afraid of it. It also means that it has to come pre-programmed, and that there needs to be a simple procedure for calibrating the legs. I would love to avoid glue if possible, but we will see how that works.

Robustness to mistakes is important, because I have limited time I can devote to support — ideally it should just work, and if it doesn’t, there should be a simple procedure to follow to figure out what is wrong. The fear of having to support hundreds of people whose robots don’t work is what stopped me from selling a Tote kit on Tindie so far, but now I decided to try my luck. It doesn’t mean I can’t try to make it as easy as possible for me.

Finally, it has to be fun out of the box, otherwise people will just assemble it, see that it works, and put it back into the drawer. If it’s fun, there is a good chance of someone deciding to hack it. Because of that, it will ship programmed as a remote-controlled toy, possibly with several modes — walking, dancing, balancing, etc. But of course it’s not just a toy, and it will be easy to program it and add custom behavior.