Steve and I did our annual appearance at Maker Faire’s Education Day. This year it was called Young Makers Day and we had an awesome turn out as usual with lots of curious children in attendance.
One of the teachers was wearing the famous Haynes R2 Repair Manual t-shirt
After about 4 hours of being bombarded with questions, the official event was over and we went to explore some of the other exhibits being setup – including this awesome retro rocket ship.
This was one of many art exhibits being setup, very 3PO but made mostly of old typewritters
Our setup was right next to the Tesla Coils, and they added the Imperial March to the routine 🙂
As a warm up for Maker Faire, the Dad’s Club at Washington Elementary School in Burlingame put on a Discovery Day for the children, hopefully inspiring them about science and engineering. I was asked by the folks at Make: to bring along my Artoo to be part of the fun this year.
Here’s some photos from the afternoon, and as always there’s more photos in the gallery.
The Bay Area Maker Faire is almost upon us, and we’ll be there in force with more droids and builders than ever before. Look for us in the Fiesta Hall. We’ll also be participating in Young Makers Day on the Friday, and hosting a builders panel at 4PM on Sunday on the main stage in the Expo Hall.
Posted by Chris on May 14th, 2010 in Events, General|Comments Off on Maker Faire Bay Area 2010
I posted this photo a few days ago for people to try and guess what I was working on. Alas, nobody got it right.
Short answer: It’s a Dual Receiver Board.
We’ve had issues at some events where our 2.4GHz Spread Spectrum radios cause problems like interfering with WiFi setups, and we’ve been asked to limit where who go. Luckily, on my Futaba 10C I can quickly switch out it’s transmitter module to either be 2.4GHz FASST or old school 72MHz FM. So I devised this little board to allow me to have two receivers (FM and FASST) connect to Artoo at once, and flip between them with a flick of a switch.
I’ve had this idea for a while, but only now getting around to implementing it because Maker Faire is in a few weeks, and I know we’re going to have interference problems and I didn’t want to limit myself to either FM or 2.4GHz – or have to make a fiddly change in the field.
Receivers connect on the left and the real servos and speed controllers connect on the right along with receiver power. Ignore the black/red/white wire color on the cables coming out of the receivers. I’m only connecting to the signal out on pin 1 for each channel, and the only nice wire I had handy was standard servo cable. The last pair in the row adds power/ground and are tied to the select switch.
I’m also tinkering with some other droid controllers and this will allow me to have them connect without disrupting too many things, but more on that later.
RoboGames was last weekend, both Matt and I brought our droids on Saturday and I soloed the event on Sunday. As usual the place was packed with people and all things robotics, from 200lb fighting battlebots to more peaceful robots that fold your laundry.
One of the highlights for me was getting to talk with the Mech Warrior guys. They had some of the most sophisticated robots in the competition, and had developed some interesting control techniques I’d like to try on R2 sometime soon.
Here’s one of their bots traversing their mini city hunting down it’s prey – bb-guns at the ready.
These bots are huge, here’s a shot next to R2 for scale
I got to hang out with Grant Imahara from Mythbusters (and an ILM alumni). He graciously spent over an hour signing and taking photos with his fans for free. And Artoo stood by entertaining the crowd while they waited.
Helping the Mech Warriors was Fon Davis, model maker extraordinaire, also an ILM alumni, who among many other things worked on repairing/painting the original OT droids for the Prequels. He also built the mini city arena for the Mech Warriors, and had some MORAV models on show – he also graciously offered to keep and eye on my stuff – Thanks Fon 🙂
This is the PR2 robot , some of you may have seen recent videos of it on YouTube performing all sorts of complicated tasks, like folding your laundry.
As usual there was a lot of kids at the event
This little girl was very enamored with all things Artoo. Matt was very gracious and allowed her to control some of the sounds on his droid, and she followed us around for a big part of the afternoon. I’m pretty sure we have a couple of droid builders in the making with her family.
I had my fair share of scared kids but this was my only crier for the weekend – I normally get at least a couple more.
This woman appeared from nowhere to grab her chances at a photo. I’m not sure if Artoo or I was more frightened what she was going to do next
This is my most favorite shot of the weekend I found on flickr. Titled “R2R2 – A kid admires a pair of Artoos while his dad admires their makers.”. Original photo by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com.
Bonnie Burton over at the Official SW Blog did a real nice write up of our attendance at WonderCon this year, including some great photos and videos – check it out.
Posted by Chris on April 19th, 2010 in Events|Comments Off on R2 WonderCon coverage at SW.com
Here’s some photos and video from our WonderCon on Sunday, including our R2 Builders Panel.
Sundays builders in attendance: Me, Steve, Matt, Grant and Gerard.
This is the first year where we’ve done two days of WonderCon with our droids, but we were locked into Sunday because our panel was that day. With it being Easter Sunday we were a little concerned that attendance would be low. We were also going to be one of the last panels of the day, and on top of that they put is in a much bigger room this year. But about 10 minutes before the start people began to line up outside and we just about filled the room. We were told it was probably the fullest panel on the Mezz level all weekend.
We bumped into Bonnie Burton from SW.com early on Sunday morning.
I just had to get a photo with Wolverine Solo
I lost count how many hugs Artoo got thru the day
We also did a couple of interviews, or at least Artoo did
Lots of children in attendance this year, and I don’t think Artoo made any cry
Artoo got to meet a couple of celebrities again, incl. Peter Mayhew and Lou Ferrigno
Before the panel started I got to speak with some future builders who had questions about the controller
Matt did an awesome job of leading the panel 🙂
To mix things up I drove Artoo into the audience thru the presentation, sometimes responding to Matt’s point in the presentation to point out or demo something on the droid or even to heck or beep at back at him. The crowd love it
The room was just about full and we got some great questions and feedback from the attendees
After the panel was done we hung out side to try and answer more questions – And wanting to share I sometime entrust my Artoo for others to try out, this was Barry driving him. He’s one of the official WonderCon photographers who’s shared some great photos with us over the years.
We were done by 4pm and I was feeling good that the weekend went well. As I went to pick up the van, my wife took this photo of Artoo carrying his new backpack ready to drive out. It thought it look like he was at an airport ready to go on holiday after a busy few days of work 🙂
I owe a big thanks to Matt for organizing our attendance this year, and also to Gerard for coming back in on Sunday to help as our backup handler. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have an extra set of hands. As far as I’m concerned it’s almost impossible to have a stress free day if you try and attend an event like this on your own.
As usual many more photos can be found in the gallery.
