RAD 3.0 Basics

The RAD 3.0 was a new design with a new voice recognition system for speaking commands to the robot.  There is also a remote but for some reason a large number of these stop working.   Maybe thats why there is the voice recognition system.   It does give you some way to control the robot even without the remote.   I have found many of these missing the remote and only found a few that the remote still work.   The worst thing about the 3.0 and 4.0 is that they are not really very mobile.   There is tiny motorized wheels under the feet that barely operate on a smooth floor.  Moving from smooth floor to rug or just crossing doorway thresholds scags up the robot every time.   This is a long way from the mobility of the RAD 1.0 and 2.0 with its track drive.   The earlier models could go in every room of the house and could adventure outdoors as well. The 4.0 can not operate on dirt, grass or anything that is not hard and smooth.  From a hacking standpoint there is not a lot of value in the robots chassis itself because it does not have any motorized parts.  It looks cool but the hands and arms do nothing so basically its just a shell.   The simplest first hack for this model is to change the drive system.   It would at least make the toy fun to play with.   What is one of the best universal drive systems out there?  You got it, the track drive off of a RAD 1.0 or 2.0!  So an easy hack would be to hack off the 3.0 feet and mount a track drive unit from an earlier model.   There are 2 wires going down the legs in the motors in the feet, attaching these to the each drive motor in the tracks would give you a voice activated system that can go places.   I will tackle the drive system change-out hack in a later posting.