The results from Sparkfun’s self-destructing robot contest are in, and there were some excellent entries: a teddy bear birthday party gone wrong, a Lego robot that cuts through the wrong cord, and a ghost piñata that gets attacked by excited children. It looks like a pretty fun event! Designing self-destructing robots can be serious work, however, as the creator of the winning teddy bear entry (above) remarked:
I have to agree with sgrace. It was a great competition and incredibly hard to get stuff to fail on cue. Brian worked for a week to figure out the perfect way to connect his Legos so they would shatter on impact yet stay together long enough to saw through a 3/8″ thick rope holding up a 40 bound bag of sand.
For my video, several of the cheap Chinese servos in the bear and clown failed prematurely, the bear was WAY too flammable, and either several igniters failed to go off or some of my connecting fuses didn’t work. (That’s why there were fireworks going off at the end of the burn.) The end result was still pretty spectacular though.
Yeah, I always have problems with my robots being too flammable, too!
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