Manchester Digital Laboratory

Thanks! What a fantastic day! Robot Hack Day and Footballing Robots just took place, and frankly, we were blown away. Through the day over 50 roboteers – experts and tinkerers alike – joined in and made Robots! Made Robots! It’s worth repeating. People who had never even replaced a battery got to grips with soldering irons, resistors and ripping the guts out of CD drives. Groups of strangers got together and made friends over a shared capacitor or diode. It was great to see this happen and we hope the connections made on the day grow and bear further electronic fruit.

After brief introductions around 10am, people got busy and started stripping equipment. Attendees brought vast amounts of old kit, and coupled with the kind donations from Cool Components, Emerge Recycling and supporting tools from Oomlout and Crafty Tech, MadLab was swimming in potential robot energy.

Adrian Marshall took a few people on an exploration of building solar-power robot dragonflies, teaching soldering skills along the way and introducing the principles of BEAM robotics.

Other groups had plans already in place. Anthony and Paul from BBC R&D showed their telepresence bot, and built remote control features on the day, with a two-way video and audio connection between both ends of their system.

Aaron, Balaji and Thomas designed and built a tripedal extending walking robot out of the tray assemblies of five CD rom drives, which was simultaneously amazing and baffling. (See more of ‘Shuffles, the CD ROM Inchbot!” )

A number of bristlebots appeared and shuffled their way around the space, while autonomous (Alan’s) rovers (Chris’) were another popular format – with or without an embedded arduino theramin and sound system.

One roboteer, Dina, went from total novice to creating a solar-sensitive mouse-based bot; a testament to both her can-do attitude and the buzz of activity helping her along.

The end of the hack day, overrunning on 30 minutes of pure soldering adrenaline, saw a demonstration of everyone’s robots, from the fuzzy to the autonomous, the profane to the reclaimed. Gareth won an Arduino for his profanely-named theramin bot plans, and a surprising number of other prize categories resulted in people going home with robotics books, copies of Make magazine, and hackable toys from Mattel. Howduino’s Bubblino toasted the winners with a flurry of hashtags.

We were really impressed by the energy and activity that took place; a few visitors assumed everyone knew each other on the day already, which wasn’t the case – everyone got together in the spririt of sharing and making things happen, which was a real buzz for both the participants and organisers. We hope to see everyone again when we’re fully up and running, and maybe a few budding experts can join in and lead new workshops.

We have to thank everyone who made it possible – from our sponsors, especially Cool Components, O’Reilly and Oomlaut for their kind donation of prizes – to our experts, who contributed their time and experience: Adrian McEwan, Aaron Nielsen, Ben Winstone and Adrian Marshall; and last but most importantly, Manchester Science Festival, Walking with Robots, and Laura Drane for involving us with their programme.

A few people managed to capture video and images – if you have any, add them to the pool (or just see what’s there already).

…But that wasn’t everything!

Robot Football

Adrian Marshall continued the evening with his rapid-fire robot football tournament. Organising six teams, each was given a few basic motors and parts and shown how to assemble a footballing robot chassis. After an introductory obstable course training round, each team found their niche in attacking, defending and dribbling. Pitting all the robot players against each other allowed each team to observe winning tactics and review their design, before testing updated versions of their robots. Despite some seriously spirited competition, the game was ultimately won by Suhail, Segun and Clive’s team, with Pro Evolution veteran Clive at the controls. Again, our thanks to all who took part and particularly the fantastic organiser and refbot pilot Adrian.

The MadLab Robot hackday continues!

Well, online for now, at least. If you attended, there’s a few things you can do to keep the momentum up – add your findings to the wiki to provide a basis for our next robot day, add your pictures to the pool, link in your name and online profiles in the photos so people can get back in touch. Leave a comment here about how you got on, and what you’d like to do next time!

Thanks again to everyone who made this day such a great success – from the young to old, the local community to those who travelled in from afar. You set a high bar for us to live up to for future events!