WonderCon starts this Friday in San Francisco – Gerard, Steve, Tiny and I will be there with our droids and we’ll be hosting another builders panel.

It was a year ago that I first met Steve at WonderCon and got him hooked on droid building – he’ll be debuting R2-XS.

StarWars.com has also posted a run down on all things SW that will be happening that weekend, and it looks to be a busy one, with Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Daniel Logan, Ray Park and Matthew Wood will be there signing autographs.

Our panel is on Saturday at 12:30pm in room 236/238. If you’re planning on attending, please let me know or stop on by and say hi.

R2-D2 Droid Building Basics— Chris James, Ryan Goff, and Steve Simmons share their experiences and demonstrate working droids. Topics range from materials, tools needed, basic electronics, and radio control information to make your own R2 come to life! Special guest Don Bies, former ILM modelmaker and Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3 droid wrangler.

The full programming schedule is now online here.

Related:

• More WonderCon Videos
• WonderCon Photo
• R2 Meets The Doctor
• Meet R2 Builders at WonderCon

I can’t believe January is already over – it’s been a busy couple months, but nothing major to report and no modifications/additions to the droid. We’ve been at a few events along the way and I’ve been tardy in posting photos and updates – sorry :)  On top of that I’ve been slowly building up to maybe working on a second droid. I’m really tempted to try my hand at putting together a light weight Styrene droid based on Dave Everett’s new plans.

Con season is also just around the corner, so that means working on schedules and fixing a few things, I’ve also been helping Steve with R2-XS to get it ready for WonderCon, which start on February 27th. It was a year ago that he met Gerard and I there.

WonderCon has grown considerably since Comic-Con took over, and last year they had close to 30,000 people in attendance, so no small con by any means. We’ll be hosting another Droid Building Panel, and the good news is Don Bies has kindly agreed to be our special guest, so if you’re in town you’ll have to stop by and say hi.

And today, I finally got my new license plates I ordered last August on the van.

Very cool video from BoingBoing TV showing the TechShop in Menlo Park, CA – it’s kind of a “gym”  for geeks / community tinkering space. Membership is required, but they do have a vast array of machines that would help any R2 Builder along.

My photo with Artoo appeared on the front of the Make Blog today to advertise the next MakeSF meetup. Photo was from last months event at Instructables in San Francisco.

Which reminds me that I need to upload and post the photos from the event 🙂

The meeting is Tuesday, January 13th at 6:30 PM

Location:
Instructables HQ 489 Clementina St. – 3rd Floor
San Francisco CA

http://www.makesf.org

[Link]

From the album Christmas in the Stars sung by Jon Bon Jovi before he was famous. An MP3 version can be found here to download.

Thanks to Victor for reminding me about the song 🙂

Summary of posts and activities for November 2008

• My Artoo in a Clone Wars Promo
• Disney Trip (now with more droids)
• Halloween 2008

Earlier this week I was fortunate to be asked to bring Artoo to the ranch for an all day  press conference for the new Clone Wars TV series.

It was a late minute request so unfortunately neither Gerard or Steve were available to come with me.

I arrived just before 10am and I was joined by Mark and Anthony from the 501st’s Golden Gate Garrison.

It ended up being a very long but fun day, and we got to meet a lot of the people working on the new show, from the stars to the engineers and artists.

Dave Filoni (Clone Wars Director)

Matthew Wood (General Grievous and sound editor)

Matt Lanter (Anakin Skywalker voice actor)

Ashley Eckstein (Ahsoka Tano voice actor)

One of the coolest thing was between shoots I got to hang out with the artists and engineers. One of them had brought down his collection of concept art figures and even some vintage R2-D2 toys. One of the demos he was showing the press was how he constructed the new Artoo (and R2-KT) for the show and some of the design decisions that went into them.

This is one of the animators on the show, note his t-shirt which has over 50 famous and not so famous robots on it (this was a big topic of discussion on the R2 Builders list a few weeks ago.)

During the course of the day I even got to the bottom of the new nickname “Artooy”, but I’ll keep that story for a astromech.net Friday night chat sometime.

They had the new and unreleased Wii lightsaber video game setup in one area, and pretty much everyone had a go playing it by the end of the day, including Dave Filoni and the clonetroopers.

Throughout the day there was a long line of press that had us doing all sorts of strange stuff from an interview with Artoo to the the clones playing soccer for the British press.

One of the more interesting and surprising things was how the LFL employees responded to having Artoo there. Everyone had a big grin on their faces when they walked by or heard him, and  people kept on popping down from their offices to get a quick photo. I had many complements that my Artoo was “better” than the real one they sometimes bring down from the archive, and the funniest line was “Hey this one makes sounds.” 🙂

As always there’s many more photos in the gallery.

Those of you paying close attention to the Mega R2 RSS feed recently would have noticed that some links were not working correctly or strange titles appearing on some posts.

Many builders use Blogspot/Blogger from Google, and unfortunately they’ve been tinkering with the reformat their RSS feeds which broke my code. I’ve worked on fix and hopefully you should start seeing the correct links filter through in the next few hours. There’s a chance you’ll see duplicates but there’s not much I can do about that and it depends on our feed reader.

Big thanks to Samurai for first noticing the problem and letting me know.

See Also: Mega RSS Feed for Builders Blog