A New Revision

Tue, Mar 27, 2018

While I really do love how far I’ve gotten with Bo-e, I have to acknowledge the shortcomings with the current revision.

Issues I have with the current revision:

Battery Life
Wiring
Frame Rigidity
Display viewing angle
System Integration

As previously described, Bo-E was created out of a desire to utilize all my spare parts. Since the project has evolved past that state, the main goal of revision 2 is to resolve the issues that spare parts created.

Battery Life:

The battery life of Bo-E is too short! Or.. so I think. I’m not really sure how long it lasts, as I can’t check easily. When I say ‘Battery Life’, I really mean that I have issues with the battery system as a whole. There’s no way to check the battery status of Bo-E until it just dies on you. Charging is a pain, as dealing with lipo balance cables was an afterthought.

So the prominent things to include in a Bo-E 2.0 are:

Battery Status Indicator
Easier to manage charging port(s)

If I have the time, I’d really love:

Automated/Semi-automated charging dock (magnets?)
A larger battery (if Bo-E really does need one)

Wiring

Ok.. I swear I can do neat and organized wiring. Bo-E just.. doesn’t have it.

A lot of Bo-E’s current wiring jumble comes just from the consideration of the current frame as a prototype. Bo-E was constantly being put together and taken apart. Once it worked I just didn’t open it up again to fix the wiring.

I’d really like to solve this problem by making an internal assembly rig for Bo-E, a 3d printed ‘skeleton’ that includes wire routing and dedicated hardware mounting points.

Frame Rigidity

Bo-E’s outer shell was an 8 hour print, if I’m remembering correctly. So when it was hour 6, and I realized I had forgotten bottom mounting points in the shell, I opted to create a seperate part to be glued on, which would contain mounting points. I figured I’d print a new shell with mounting hardware when I needed to. And this is when I need to.

Display Viewing Angle

This one is really nitpicky, but the display I used for Bo-Es face (remember, a spare part), has a really bad vertical viewing angle. Being as Bo-E is this little bot on ground level, that means that a lot of my hard work on the eyes aren’t visible. Sourcing a new display would solve this.

System Integration

This is also largely the display coming back to bite me. The display I used was meant for a DIY backup camera installation in cars. So it takes RCA input. The Odroid XU3, currently Bo-E’s brain, doesn’t output RCA. So Bo-E has a messy integration of a raspberry pi zero running on USB-Ethernet which solely runs the display.. Optimally a new display would work off of hdmi for direct XU3 connection. But in a worse case scenario, the Pi needs to be much better. It currently has issues assigning itself the proper ip address (something about the emulated MAC Address changing), which makes for a bad startup sequence.