I feel I have to explain a little bit about how we will arrange the production of this supporting equipment to be used along with the robots from CITIZEN. First of all, it should be clear that CITIZEN is not designing this equipment at all, so these things have no connection to the company whatsoever. Actually not even the robot controller circuit schematics was designed by CITIZEN. The new controller was projected by me and Stefan from Wolfenbuettel and CITIZEN is doing only the circuit CAD design in order to ensure the desired level of miniaturization. What CITIZEN did design was the robot body, the motors and the rounting and component placement in the circuit board of the robot.
We do not expect every team to design an infrared transmitter, robot programmer and recharger by themselves independently. The idea is that we design these circuit boards using standard tools and collect the orders of everybody so that we can ask some company to build the boards for a reasonable price. The German team from Wolfenbuettel is taking care of the design of the recharger and programmer and the Canadian team from Manitoba is working on the infrared transmitter. We should post more details about who is working on what in here:
http://odin.pcag.fh-wolfenbuettel.de:8080/mixedreality/index.php?topic=5.0We hope we can build all three components for less than 200 dollars, but it all depends heavily on the quantity to be produced: the more we produce the less will be the unit cost. Some teams might face restrictions for importing goods, or maybe even high tax. In many countries circuit boards are treated just like books, so they do not charge tax like industrialized goods. For these countries it might be better to order the unassembled board only and then just sold the components in the lab. Some other universities might want to order these items themselves for one reason or another... this is also okay, they only have to download the files and then take care of ordering the boards and assembling them. But remember that ordering the boards by yourself will most likely cost more money than ordering all together for several teams at once.
The current version of the robot recharger is available in the CVS of our project, here:
http://pv-league.cvs.sourceforge.net/pv-league/bot-charger/To download it just use the CVS normally, like this:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@pv-league.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pv-league login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@pv-league.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pv-league co -P modulename
