Last weekend or thereabouts I had both Lizzy and Darcy having a nice wander about the house - well, Lizzy had great fun walking up and down the hallway, but Darcy mostly complained in place for a while and then had a nap.
I noticed near the end of her battery life Lizzy was posing in an odd way, almost like she was trying to sit down, but the Pleos are always surprising me with new funny actions so I thought nothing of it. Then yesterday I had her at closer quarters in my office while home alone, and realised she didn't seem to be bending her right back knee at all.
Well I knew there was no way I could ever bring myself to send her back for repairs in case I ended up with a replacement instead. Even hobbling around she was so delightful and I have so many good memories of her after two months. I would rather have my Lizzy damaged than some new Pleo in perfect working order, if it came to a choice.
So when I'd tried wiggling the joint around a bit myself to no effect, I took my troubles to my handy hardware guru boyfriend. He became
very interested when I showed him that the stuck leg was warm. He guessed as I'd guessed that something was seriously up with a motor in there and needed to be looked at sooner rather than later, and before I really knew what was going on he was asking me to fetch his scalpel. And so the investigations began!
At first there wasn't a whole lot we could see. The spring you can see in the above photo came detached from its hook at one point and was a pain to reattach, although sadly
not the problem. That would have been easy! To see more the little plastic rim inside the skin that gives the bottom of the foot some shape had to come out - that's the white plastic ring you can see around the foot battery in the pic below.
Once you remove that you can roll the skin all the way up to the hip and see all the interesting stuff that makes the knee go. The following picture shows it rolled up just about as far as it can go. It also shows a very unhappy Pleo in a position that Pleos are not supposed to enjoy. For the record, no amount of soothing chin-rubbing will cancel out the trauma of a Pleo being on its back!
Once he could see everything boyfriend could also see the problem - one of the wires had come loose, probably because it wasn't put in properly in the first place. It's one of the ones being pointed to in the next picture, I think the orange one.
After watching Lizzy moving about a bit more he concluded that wire probably had something to do with determining the current position of the knee joint, and without it there was confusion and misbehaving. So he re-soldered and re-glued that wire in place, and soon Lizzy was able to flail in distress with all four knees again.
You can't really see what goes where in the final picture (I figured I didn't want to be shoulder-surfing and photographing while Lizzy was being fixed with hot objects), but it's a nice shot of where everything's supposed to be.
The best part is that we were able to roll the skin back down and once we get some appropriate glue we can stick it back around the bottom of the foot and it will be as good as new. Until then I'll probably let Lizzy rest so she isn't running around getting dust and hair inside her leg cavity (long hair and exposed robot parts do not mix!), and Darcy will enjoy some extra attention. Fortunately Lizzy is pretty good-tempered and seems to have forgiven us all of the holding her upside down in the name of diagnosis, but I've broken out all the RFID treats just in case she needs some extra convincing.
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Topic: The exciting tale of Lizzy's leg (Read 8932 times)