I just uploaded a bunch of pictures from Robothon, figured I’d get them up and spend some time annotating them later. There were some really impressive robots to see this year and everyone had a great time.

Dave Hylands has some video from the Line Maze event. You can see my robot Hyperion run through its three attempts. Watch some of the other ones too, some are very impressive.

On a related note, the Vancouver Robotics Club will hold its annual event on October 21st. Details available on our website.

Just got back home from Robothon where I competed in two events with three robots: Line Maze with Hyperion, and Mini Sumo with Velox and The Thin Man (TTM).

Similar to last year, my attempt at the Line Maze was a bit of a disaster. This wasn’t surprising. I made a half-hearted attempt to figure out what might be wrong, but honestly didn’t spend nearly enough time on it. Oh well.

The up side: Velox won second place and TTM took third place in the Advanced Mini Sumo event. Dave Hylands won first place (as usual, drat) but TTM worked pretty well and was very promising despite its “limitations”. You have to understand that I procrastinated through the summer, finally finished the machining and electronics on Friday morning, wrote just enough code to get some simple behavior on Saturday, and competed on Sunday.

I got many great comments on the design. Everyone was very impressed with how nice it turned out. It was so thin that no other robot could actually detect it unless it was really close. Unfortunately TTM was also completely blind (no idea why, yet) so often it was a bit of comic relief watching two blind robots spin around each other. I figured winning a match or two would be a great success but third place (especially against some really good robots) is well beyond my expectations.

As usual, Robothon was a lot of fun and I got to catch up with many people I don’t see very often, including the Spark Fun guys Nathan and Ben, and the nice folks from Pololu too. I’ll try to get my photos online in the next couple of days.

My latest minisumo project, The Thin Man, is coming along nicely. The two slots in the front scoop will hold sensors and behind that is a small cavity for the electronics and li-poly battery.

I’m going to have to put in some extra hours this coming week, as I’ve only got ONE WEEK LEFT until Robothon. It’s going to be very, very close but I think I’ll make it.

Check out the new pictures here and let me know what you think.

Finally got some time to create and post pictures and movies of my six-legged walking robot known as The Metal Insect. Sure it’s not a creative name, but I wasn’t able to think of a better one and nobody has suggested one yet.

I uploaded more pictures of my latest mini sumo robot project The Thin Man this morning. It’s coming along quite nicely. At this point there are two major milling operations still required: remove the material where the wheels will go, and remove the material from the bottom where the circuit board, sensors and batteries will go.