Despite the large number of categories of robots here at RoboGames, the resounding sounds of metal on metal and cheers from the crowd keep drawing us back to the combat arena. We were immediately surprised by the variety of locations and backgrounds these teams come from, whether it’s a High School from across the country, a local engineer working in his garage, or a robotics team from Brazil.
Tomorrow kicks off the 10th year of RoboGames, a three-day extravaganza of robots and technology. The dozens of competitions cover everything from line following and fire fighting to weight lifting and mech warfare.
The Hello World Program would like to invite you to a Robot Puppet Party at the Maker Faire Bay Area next month. Hello World has been running for about a year, building a library of video tutorials on a variety of open source tech topics, narrated by handmade puppets. Guido the Python teaches the Python programming language, of course, while the robot Unique ID discusses robotics, circuitry and the basics of object-oriented programming. Currently under construction is a new fox puppet who will be in charge of HTML tutorials.
The 10th annual RoboGames, the “Olympics of Robotics,” comes to the San Mateo County Expo Center April 19-21. With over 50 events (everything from sumo wrestling, robot combat, fire-fighting, and ribbon climbing) and hundreds of different bots, there’s no better way to satisfy your love of robotics. Buy tickets before April 14th with coupon code “Maker” to get 20 percent off.
The DeltaMaker, a recent success on Kickstarter, is an elegant 3D printer built on a delta robot platform. Delta robots have been used for picking and packaging applications in factories for decades, thanks to their impressive speed and agility. The DeltaMaker uses MakerSlide aluminum extrusions paired with Delrin v-wheels on bearings to move quicker than normal printers; the Z axis in particular isn’t limited by the low speed of a threaded rod, so it can move just as quickly as the other axes.
I spoke with the company’s mechanical engineer, Zack Monninger to discuss their success on Kickstarter and what’s next.
Charles Guan is an MIT alumnus, and has been making projects that have been festive and amazing over the past few years. Charles has been influential in the MIT Makerspace/club MITERS, where students create all manner of great projects. He and MITERS members have been frequent fliers at various Maker Faires, so you may already be familiar with his work.
Charles has served as a Teaching Assistant at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, helping his fellow students to fabricate the contraptions of their dreams. As a TA, he’s heard the same questions over and over, so he created some instructional documentation to make his and his fellow students’ lives easier. This was a set of lectures and handouts he called How to Build Your Robot Really Really Fast (HTBYRRRF). In more recent times, he set out to update this as a more inclusive set of building guides. Drawing from his own online documentation, he was able to codify his ideas into a thorough Instructable: How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast, or HTBYERRF.
Italian maker and sound producer Giuseppe Acito built this robot percussion band by combining LEGO Bionicle bots, an Arduino Uno, and an iPad MIDI sequencer app.
