Day 2 - First Day of Work

Today was my first day of work, it did not feel like it thou. I remember my first day of Co-Op last year I didn't want to get out of bed. I rolled out of bed at 4am with no complains this year...Thanks jet lag!. I spent the morning on AIM talking to my friends back home for its was prime time for them. I left to work around 9am thinking 30 minute walk...well it turned out to be a hour walk! So Bryan and I both have have our own desks/cubical at the HUBO lab. Our first task was making our own Cat-5 cables. Many people poke fun at me because I keep a small card in my wallet that has Resistor Color chart and Cat-5 cable wiring. Well I made effective use of that today, Bryan and I made two working cables. Thanks John Douglas, Confero for the card!! Also my new Gerber Lockblade came in handy for cutting the shielding on the wires. I successfully loaded AutodeskInventor 2008 Computer Aided Design (CAD) software on my machine and I can't wait to do further work with it! After lunch I talked with Dr. Jun Ho Oh, he is the director of the HUBO lab, about different aspects of HUBO. I found it interesting talking to him that he entirely designed the Mechanics and Mechatronics behind HUBO. All CAD he has done himself with Autocad 2007. He has two staff members that work in the lab that take care of manufacturing the Robot using the Computer Numeric Control (CNC) and building/populating Printed Circuit Board (PCB). The first staff member then uses the CAD to generate toolpaths with MasterCAM X2. I see that my mission to learn as much as possible about the manufacturing process, may be a difficult for the staff members do not speak English. But with close observation and continuing learning of Korean I feel I will gather my knowledge needed.To the left there is a HUBO HR-4 beautifully manufactured hand. There is over 40 parts per finger! All mechanical parts other than motors are manufactured in house by their CNC Mill and Lathe.

The remainder of the day I got my first taste of surface mount soldiering. The old motor controller from the HR-3 HUBO uses a 128 pin DSP package. Below is a video of Bryan soldering his board.
The technique used by HUBO lab is to tack the two corners of the DSP to the PCB making sure it is lined up on the soldering pads. Then pool a large amount of solder and drag the soldering iron up and down the pins "brushing". Then use Flux to wick away the residual solder that is left. The goal is to have no solder left between pads, if it was left it would cause a short. A short is meant if two electrical paths that are not meant to be connected touch, will cause the component to burn up/blowup. After both boards were completed, Bryan turned out to have the better hand for doing the surface mount soldering!

After work Bryan and I went to the school "restaurant/cafeteria" where while we were eating a girl from the Netherlands came and sat with us. She was the first "foreign" English speaking person we have encountered. Bryan and I had allot of questions for her, mainly having to with the school and things to do around campus. We found out there is a support group on Facebook for foreign KAIST students. Bryan got her contact information and is going to keep in touch with her. Today we really felt like part of the crowd not just alienated people looking in on the student population!