We’re all loaded and ready to head out to WonderCon 🙂

Hope to see you at the Droid panel on Saturday.

Related:

• WonderCon Starts This Friday!

Here’s Steve with R2-XS!

I’d popped over tonite to help with some minor tuning before WonderCon, and to start loading the van.

You can’t really tell by this single photo, but the paint is actually a purple/blue chameleon formula that changes color in different lighting.

He even has a matching purple interior.

Here’s a short video of XS in action, he’s pretty speedy even with the heavy Optima battery in there 🙂

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.

Here’s a videos I just found on YouTube of our appearance at WonderCon this year.

I really like this photo I found of Gerard and I at WonderCon

WC2008-088, originally uploaded by Barry Brown.

Related Posts:

• WonderCon 2008 Show Report

Related Posts:

• WonderCon 2008 Show Report

Thought I’d post a quick show report for WonderCon and our “R2 Droid Building Basics” panel.

I’m just about recovered after a real busy few weeks. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just the event, but I had a droid to finish which meant lots of late nights – but isn’t that always the way.

Luckily the day of the event went pretty smooth. With some help of some friends who showed up early to help us unload, Gerard and I were in and setup by 8:30am. Doors opened to the public at 9am, and the fun started. We spent the morning zipping around the convention entertaining the crowds.

We didn’t have a booth or anything as there’s too few of us to run it, but we were luckily to have access to the 501st break room to store our gear and charge our batteries.

People love the R2’s and were surprised to see one, then realized there were two of them running around.

I think Leia couldn’t decide which one to send on the secret mission!

The first glitch in our plan was the carpets – for some reason our droids didn’t like them at all. At C4 I didn’t have any issue with any of the floors, carpeted or not, but at WonderCon it seemed to sap our batteries really quickly. We’re both using JAG drive systems and NPC motors, and were getting around 60-90 minutes of runtime on about 21Ah worth of batteries. Compared to C4, my droid is a little heavier, but only by 20lbs, and I was getting closer to 3 hours off of the same battery system. [edit – see the following post for the diagnoses/fix]

My stand by set of batteries also had a problem which made me late for the Rebel Legion photo shoot, but Gerard made it.

At 1pm we started to get ready for our panel. People were already lying up outside anxious to get a seat – which surprised me. Turn out was great, with about 80 people in attendance and lots of questions were asked. Don made a brief appearance at the end too which was great.

Our panelists of local builders were –

Gerard Fajardo
Ryan Goff
Chinh Nguyen-Duc
David Calkins
Chris James

Panel Description –

R2-D2 Droid Building Basics – Come meet local builders who will 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! This panel sponsored by the R2 Builders Club.

Thanks to Andy S for his slide deck which ours was based on. If anyone would like a copy of ours please let me know.

We did try and head into the dealer room in the afternoon, but it was way to busy and again the carpet was slowing us down. So we opted to stay closer to the main entrance on the tile floor. On the way out we did come across Doctor Who and a Dalek who was fascinated by our domed friends.

My photos from the event are here, and my favorite has got to be this one

There’s also some photos on the Official Star Wars Blog Flickr pool

I’m hoping to be back next year, maybe with more droids in attendance (and bigger batteries)

Related Posts:

• Battery Power Issue Resolved
• R2 Meets The Doctor
• WonderCon Photo