Teardown: Sony’s New Aibo Goes Under The Knife

October 22, 2018 by Drew Littrell 22 Comments

In a complete surprise, Sony has moved to release the latest version of their robotic dog series, Aibo, in North America. The device is already out in Japan, where there are a number of owner’s clubs that would rival any dedicated kennel club. Thanks to the [Robot Start] team, we now have a glimpse of what goes into making the robotic equivalent of man’s best friend in their teardown of an Aibo ERS-1000.

According to Yoshihiro of Robot Start, Aibo looks to be using a proprietary battery reminiscent of the Handycam camcorders. Those three gold contacts are used for charging on the rug shaped power base that Aibo will periodically return to in order to take a”nap”. There are a couple of square OLED screens behind those puppy dog eyes. They are full-color OLEDs somewhere in the one-inch ballpark. Between the screens is a capacitive touch sensor that wraps around to the top of the head that are also pressure sensitive.

According to Sony’s press release, the fish-eye camera housed in Aibo’s snout is used to identify faces as well as navigating spaces.

Laying out all the major parts out together certainly drives home the complexity of the latest Aibo. It’ll be interesting to see the progression of this device as all of them come equipped with 4G LTE and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi that connect to Sony’s servers for deep learning.

New behaviors are supposed to download automatically as long as the device is under the subscription plan. While Sony has no current plans to integrate with any voice-activated virtual assistant, we can still look forward to the possibility of some expanded functionality from the Hackaday community.

For the rest of the teardown photos make sure to head over to [Yoshihiro]’s write up on Robot Start. Also just in case anybody cared to see what happens when the first generation Aibo ERS-111 from 1999 meets the 2018 Aibo ERS-1000, you’ll find the answer in the video below:

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Cracking Open An Ancient Avionics Gyroscope

July 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

This artificial horizon might as well have come from an alien ship. [Mike] somehow manages to get his hands on most interesting equipment, this time its a very old piece of avionics equipment. The mechanical gyroscope functioned as the artificial horizon, and he’s going to take us inside for a look. He doesn’t spend quite as much time on it as he did that thermal imaging camera, but this electro-mechanical odyssey is just as interesting.

To get the accuracy needed to help keep a plane in the air (well to keep the pilot well-informed anyway) the device needed to be very well manufactured. [Mike] comments several times along the way on how the different rotating parts are so well-balanced and machined that they seem nearly frictionless. It appears that a lot of the positional feedback depends on wirewound resistor rings which connect to a rotating piece via a series of very fine spring wires. As the parts rotate the resistance changes and that’s what gives the feedback. There are also mercury switches to help along the way.

He does his best to explain, but to us the inner workings are still a big mystery. See if you can get a clearer picture from the video after the break.

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