A quick trip to Robotic at Scienceworks
As a crazy robot guy, it’s important to me to be exposed to lot’s of things I don’t know. For this reason I buy cool tech things like the xpider and the geio ar battle robots and I often go to events and talk to people about tech.
Recently a place that’s close to my heart, Scienceworks did their annual Robotica event.
Robotica?
Robotica is a small-ish event that’s offered as part of the price of museum entry which is free for many and very reasonably priced for everyone else. The event is based around the creativity, history and technologies involved in robotics.
They had a fantastic keynote Dianne McGrath and a talk on robotic companions by Sam Kingsley.
Crazies!
In the Pumphouse there was a bunch of tech vendors, people form hackspaces and other robot-mad people — which for me is the really interesting part.
It was forty-something degrees and while the pumphouse had some very cool evaporative cooling machines but it was still super-hot, these poeple had braved the heat just ot show us all what was fun in their world.
I love being around people who are passionate, obsessed and spend enough time on something to feel how it works or what it is. Being around these people inspires me to think differently and have a better attitude.
Saucy Robots
My friends at the Connected Community HackerSpace brought along their Sauce printer. This is an ordinary 3d printer that has been modified, it uses dual peristaltic pumps instead of a hot-end, some cool software hacks and a couple of giant buttons to deploy your saucy goodness.
I hope they made it open sauce :D
After a while of geeking out with some of the people I know about multi-legged robots and different ways to make them move
More Makers
MakerCommunity they are a hack space in Brunswick. I spent heaps of time talking to the people at the start particularly around how they just can’t get enough teachers in electronics.
Walky Robots
My friends at Tribotix bought a bunch of their amazing Dynamixel gear including a very cool bipedal robot that was geared up for playing soccer.
The robot is an OP3 and it’s got heaps of tech in it. My one goal of the day was to get a selfie with a cool robot:
Little Bits
There was a fantastic person at the robogals — they have a bunch of very cool, small electronics projects that are designed around making it easier for young women to get into tech. They had some rock-paper-scissors microbits and even a microbot kit that lets you fling a love heart from your microbit to a friend’s.
Some vendors
These sorts of events always come with vendors who are spruking interesting things that they sell. It’s always interesting to see the commercial products available in robotics these days.
Pakronics had an exciting range of robots including a bunch of mbot kits and they also sell microbits if you’re interested in giving them a go.
A useful learning tool
Mbot and microbits both use a visual coding style that is similar to scratch.
The goal of visual coding syles like scratch, is to introduce the rather abstract concepts in software engineering like variables, conditions, loops, blocks and basic functions in a way that is easy for people to pick up.
People of all ages can use a visual coding language to program a light to go on without typing a line of code.
Fin
Overall it was a fantastic day and I look forward to seeing all the people there next year :)
Happy making!
