Robot Fest 2010
Today the family and I went to Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were any number of fun displays and workshops, including in no particular order: compressed-air rocket launches, Lego robots to control and build, a vocoder that makes you sound like a robot, plush toys coming to life with embedded movement kits, a Vibrabot workshop (Laurel built one), Martin Luther King speaking with facial expressions modeled by electroluminescent wire, and several 3-D printers to look at.
The kids loved it. Laurel soldered for the first time to make the Vibrabot. Her paper rocket also went much higher than average — I think it was due to our extra tape on the nose cone and carefully parallel fins. Holly diligently followed the directions to build a Lego robot, and insisted on wearing her robot shirt today.
Laurel and her Vibrabot
I was very happy to meet some HacDC cohorts in real life, including Andrew, Tim, Daniel, Mark, Nikolas, and Elliott. Nice folks and I look forward to hanging out with them more at the Microcontroller Mondays. I have yet to make it out there for one of those, but maybe tomorrow…I could use some help debugging the coasterbot.
There are many more pictures to see in my photo album.