PiMecha Humanoid Robot Based on Raspberry Pi Sells for about $500

SB Components introduced PiMecha humanoid robot powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero (W)/ A+ / 2 / 3 (B+) board, and offering 17 degrees of freedom (DoF) on Kickstarter a few months ago. But with KS backers expecting their rewards in September, the company is now taking pre-orders on their own website for the robot for 399 GBP, or about $511 at today’s exchange rate.

The company has apparently not published any detailed specifications of the robot on their website. But the robot is basically comprised of an outer shell comprised of removable metal pieces, and precise smartbus servo motors. Your chosen Raspberry Pi board would be fitted to the robot’s chest together with PiMecha shield add-on board handling the servo control.

PiMecha can be easily customized with a Pi camera, an LCD display, your own sensors an so on. SB Components provide software to program the robot in order to make it walk, dance, ride a bike, fight, or whatever you want. Two different control software are provided:

• PiMecha Setting to program individual servos sending commands over UART
• PiMecha Control with a more visual interface, and allowing you share your program with friend.

The company mentioned they’d release the PCB layout, design files, Python source code after the campaign is finished, but I could not find anything yet, so they may do so after shipping rewards to KS backers next month.

PiMecha robot targets STEM education, robotic studies, programming, research & development and more…

Eventually, I’d expect more information on SB Components’ products page with a page setup specifically for PiMecha.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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