Repair of broken Nao robot battery pack

The battery pack for our Aldebaran / SoftBank Robotics Nao V6 robot broke and we are currently not able to find a reseller that ships to our country. Even contacting SoftBank Robotics directly did not result in any response. The official specifications are available here. Since the battery pack was clearly broken we decided to open it up to be able to find a replacement battery ourselves.

Opening the casing is difficult, since it is not only kept in place with latches, but is also glued together. We used a soldering iron at the seams to open open the case.

The battery back seems to consist of six Sony US18650NC1 2900mAh batteries. They are connected with seven wires to a PCB board. The power supply connects with two cables to the PCB board. In addition, the case has two contacts next the charger plug that could be used for detecting if the battery cover is closed. Five contacts connect the battery pack to the robot of which the first two bigger ones seem to carry the power. The four smaller contacts are probably to communicate with between the robot and the battery PCB board.

We ordered some new batteries and will keep you updated on the developments.

Raspberry C64 Pi Audio and Cooling Update

It was time to improve the performance of this Raspberry C64 Pi computer by adding the official regulated fan to the case. I also added a USB audio adapter to improve the sound quality. With these two inexpensive upgrades, the Raspberry Pi performs much better and the audio quality is much improved.

Softbank Robotics Robot Settings Software Cannot Connect To Server

I am working my way through updating our Nao robots and I was able to install the latest version of Choregraphe (2.8.6.23) on a Mac OS X computer that still runs an an older version of the OS (10.13.6 High Sierra). The problem is that the newest version of Choregraphe expects to communicate with the newest version of NAOqi, the operating system of the Nao robots. Problem is again that the Aldebaran online community has been closed and hence you cannot directly download the latest version fo NAOqi.

Softbank Robotics is now offering the Robot Settings app that should allow you to update your Nao robot. The installer even works on Mac OS X 10.15 Catalina. I connected my Nao via a ethernet cable directly to my Mac and was able to connect to it using Robot Settings.

I was able to connect the robot to the internet using Wifi. The problem comes with the next step called “Synchronisation”.

Robot Settings is unable to connect to the “server”. I assume that this would be a server over at Aldebaran or Softbank Robotics. In any case, it is impossible to get beyond this step.

I used the Robot Settings up with our latest Nao V6 and this time it worked. But it does not allow you to update NAOqi, just other apps that you might have downloaded from their App Store. Our Nao V6 does not have the latest version of NAOqi and hence again I am stuck.

You could use Choregraphe to update NAOqi (see screenshot) but this would require that you had already downloaded NAOqi, which is currently impossible.

The last method would be to use the Flasher application and a USB stick to update the robot. But again, you would already need to have the NAOqi image available.

Softbank Robotics, please get your support up and running again. You make it very difficult for us to operate the products you sold us.