1. Jartron! Jartron! Jartron!
Jartron’s creator, Dan Ray, wins a $500 cash gift card, a Maker Faire Bay Area ticket, and a swanky Jameco jacket. Congrats, Dan! You really blew all of us out of the water with this bot, the fun video, your great PDF documentation — all of it.
BTW: Jartron will be at Maker Faire! Check for details at the Jameco booth. Hopefully we can get some of the other contestants to bring (or ship us) their entries. Matt Mets and I will be talking about the Make: Robot Build at the Jameco booth on Saturday afternoon. We’ll post the time when it’s confirmed.
Now, the Second Place prize. And the award goes to…
2. UFO (Unidentified Floor Object)!
Congrats to builder Jacky Snipes. You win a Parallax Stingray Robot and a Jameco T-shirt.
And finally, we have our Third Place winner. The envelope please… And the winner is…
3. HUL-10!
This was definitely one of our staff favorites and we love how Steve Joiner involved his two boys in the build and some of the great ideas they came up with. The HUL-10 team wins a $100 Jameco gift certificate and a Jameco T-shirt.
The judging for this contest was amazingly hard. Any of these three entries could have been the winner. And there were a number of other real contenders, too. Frankly, we were stunned, and inspired, by the quality of all the entries. As one of our judges, Tod Kurt, pointed out, it’s a significant thing to build a working robot, even from a parts bundle, and even if it only has a simple bump sensor. If you’re new to robotics, engineering all of the subsystems, getting them to all work together, programming the bot, and all the rest of it, is a real accomplishment. And we had a number of people who were absolute beginners to robots, microcontrollers, and programming. So congrats to ALL of you! And as we promised, everyone who participated is going to get a Maker’s Notebook. We’ll get those sent out to you ASAP.
We’ll have more information on Jartron, UFO, HUL-10, and many of the other awesome entries in a follow-up post.
And don’t let the ending of the contest stop you from building your own CoasterBot! We amassed a nice corpus of beginner and intermediate DIY bot building information and resources over the course of the contest. Jameco still has the robot bundles we put together, we have all of the back issues of the Robot Build Newsletter, and the robot discussion area in the MAKE Forums will keep going. All of this can be found on the Make: Robot Build Landing Page. (And if you do build a CoasterBot, please load it onto the MAKE Flicker pool and tag it “coasterbot.” We’ll feature some of these here on the site.
Speaking of which, you can see a number of the other entries here on Flickr and YouTube.
Besides a big thank you to the entire MAKE team who was involved in putting this program together, a special thanks to Jameco for being such a dream to work with, and Tod Kurt, for helping with the judging.
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