Reminder: Make: Robot Build. Sign up!

Have you always wanted to build a robot but didn’t know how? Have you always wanted to turn those old Debbie Gibson CDs into something useful? Got a use for a $500 gift card? For all these reasons and more, you should check out The Make: Robot Build Contest. As we announced last week, the contest will officially start on March 27th, but we’ll send out the first Make: Robot Build Newsletter this Friday, and each Wednesday after that. The contest will run through May 7th. We’ll be running robot build tutorials here on the site (and in the newsletter) until the contest ends. The build and the contest are designed to appeal to robot enthusiasts of any skill level, so even if you haven’t built a bot before, don’t hesitate to join in! We’re even going to give points to those who seem to improve/learn the most during the build process.

You can sign up for the newsletter right here:

My original post about the contest is here.
The official landing page for the contest is here.
A convenient parts bundle, put together by contest sponsors Jameco, can be purchased here.

A “CoasterBot” I built for my 2003 book, Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots

2 Responses to Reminder: Make: Robot Build. Sign up!

John Park on March 17th, 2010 at 12:55 pm said:

Gareth, that bot’s a beauty — too bad you ruined a rare, valuable AOL CD to make it…

Reply ↓
- Gareth Branwyn on March 17th, 2010 at 5:36 pm said:
  
  Thanks, John. You TOO can build one! We based the Jameco bundle on this bot. It’s pretty much the same components except we’re using an Ardweeny instead of an OOPIC-R MCU. What’s an OOPIC? Exactly. A cool idea for an object-oriented MCU with nifty virtual circuits you could build to perform various real-time tasks. Unfortunately, it never really caught on.
  
  My book was written seven years ago, but amazingly, most of it is still relevant because most of it was analog/BEAM-based bots. The only project that’s seriously dated is this one. But hey, we’re about to change that!
  
  In the first newsletter (out on Friday) I tell the story of how I invented the coasterbot (or CDBot) in my sleep. NOT!
  
  Reply ↓