The servos arrived, and the build went super smoothly. I’m inappropriately proud of my color scheme.
They’ve got the best tutorial I’ve ever seen. IKEA could absolutely take notes.
The servos literally snapped into place and the included hardware was all that was needed to put the robot together. No mystery missing screws, no weird improvisations, no digging through coffee cans full of old bolts. Everything was there. That was the first.
And the servos Daisy chain together. So the anticipated wire fiasco was minimal.
On the digital side, Cursor did everything.
I gave it the web address for the LeRobot project and the SO-101 arm, and it planned the setup, installed everything we needed, and handheld me through the motor ID and calibration process.
FYI, it is highly advised to ID the servos before setting up the robot.
With surprisingly little troubleshooting, I was logged into my robot through a website and controlling the robot hand.
Kind of.
I never actually got the phone control working well. I troubleshot it with Cursor for way too long, but the best I ever got was three of the servos awkwardly reacting to the phone.
It also became pretty clear that doing anything requiring finesse using a cell phone, and especially controlling the gripper with a little slider on a touchscreen, was going to be impractical.
It was very cool to get the thing wiggling, but if I want anything resembling decent teleoperation, I’m going to need the leader arm.
That pushes back quality teleoperation until after Santi leaves, which is a little disappointing. But I think I properly compensated for abandoning my mechanical engineering degree pursuit.
Critically, the servos for the leader arm are not just 6 of the same servo. They have different gear ratios involved and apparently that’s important. You can buy full leader/follower kits with all the servos included, but you can’t just buy the leader-arm servo set as a simple bundle.
So now I’m ordering from the servo company in China, and naturally they don’t even have all the needed servos in the same warehouse.
Moral of the story: just buy the full kit.