Chuck Durham (a.k.a. "cdraptor") got his hands on an SPC-101C, the new humanoid robot made by Speecys. The SPC-101C is quite a piece of work. It’s just over a foot tall, and it sports 22 Futaba serial servos, a video camera, WiFi network connectivity, stereo audio output, and a whole slew of LED’s for. Chuck was kind enough to post a quick unboxing report in our forums, and we figured we’d take it one step further and blog about it. Here it is, from the man himself:
Well I got the SPC-101C today and spent a good amount of time trying to figure out enough from the manuals (in Japanese – which I don’t read). I actually figured out a good bit with the diagrams and such. The worst was getting it to connect to the wireless – I won’t go into details because they very likely may change some when it’s released here in the US. To start off here are some unboxing pics.
Now for some info. It’s fully assembled with full body casing, The SPC has a video camera and you can see in the above picture it has a video receiver – I hooked it up to the big screen for now, as soon as it was on the picture was coming up – it’s much clearer than the little swan camera I bought and the reception was a lot better. It has a battery (which is the same that is in my Futaba RBT-1 so that is nice) and it comes with AC Power Adapter. You don’t even need the battery in, you can just plug it into AC power and turn it on and it boots up – very cool feature if you want to set up the SPC-101C for some security with the vid cam or have it checking data from the web – right by the foot you can see a USB WiFi adapter which fits nicely into the back. One funny note on the AC Power is where you plug him in, which is his lower backside. I installed and ran the MIRAI-VCE control application which you connect from the application through the web and you can send commands with the arrows on the app to move forward/backward/turn left/turn right – there were some pre-programmed demos which you can see on the existing video, including the very cool hysterical laughing routine. Next day or so and I will be playing with the motion editor, I am getting some translation done on the buttons so I know what the heck I am setting, the servo control adjusting and 3D representation can be used for moving for poses – It actually is very similar to the Futaba RBT-1 motion editor, not overly surprising since the SPC-101C is using a Futaba RPU, Servos and Battery. |
Well, there you have it! Check out the thread for more info, and for any updates from Chuck.
You may also want to check out PlanetSpeecys.com.
Hi! I also had that robot and can’t read the manual so accurately. I successfully able to operate SPC-101C with its power connected to A/C adapter, however I couldn’t set it up using the battery alone. I’d like to ask how to charge the battery and to run it in battery mode? I hope you can help me with this matter. Thanks.