Welcome to Our 8th Dispatch!
MAKE Needs Robots!
Well, that was a whole lot of fun! We hope you enjoyed your CoasterBot building experience and you learned something about robots, MCUs, and programming along the way. Now it's time to submit your entry, sit back, and see what happens.
And, as always, if you have any questions, you can ask us in the Forums or email us.
Let's Make: Robots!
Gareth and Matt
back to top Submit Your Project!
Here's the CoasterBot Entry Form. You have until Friday (May 7th) Monday (May 10th, 11:59pm PDT) to submit your entry. The deadline has been extended to give you the weekend to finish up your build, but please fill out the form ASAP. It's going to take some time for us to properly evaluate all of the submissions!
Don't forget the prizes that are at stake:
Grand Prize: $500 cash (in the form of a pre-paid credit card), a free ticket to Maker Faire Bay Area 2010 held on May 22-23 in San Mateo, Calif., and a Jameco jacket. Estimated retail value is $599.95. The Grand Prize Winner may use the $500 credit card towards travel to Maker Faire to present the winning robot, which will be featured at the Faire.
Second Prize: Stingray Robot and a Jameco T-shirt. Total estimated retail value is $314.95.
Third Prize: $100 Jameco gift certificate along with a Jameco T-shirt. Total estimated retail value is $115.
And everybody who submits a finished build will get a Maker's Notebook, courtesy of Maker Shed. So get those entries in!
back to top Highlights from the Robot Build
By Matt Mets
Thanks for participating. This contest has been a blast! And we're not done yet (you have through the weekend to finish up!). Here are some of our favorite build moments so far:
KurtWM's thermoforming experiment.
Noah explains his team's CoasterBot.
Building the 1-hour CoasterBot.
Steve Joiner's DIY "coaster" wheels.
back to top Maker Profile: David Mc Anulty
This week we meet another of our robot builders.
I'm a Unix systems administrator in my mid-30s. I have a wife and two boys. I have no formal electronics education. I've enjoyed tearing things apart since I was first able to grab a screwdriver (my parents say I disassembled my crib one night). My personal website is at http://www.hellspark.com.
For the robot: I have a blog set up at davemakerobot.blogspot.com. I have links to some YouTube videos and a picture gallery. In various blog posts I say something to the effect of:
Instead of making a better bot, I focus on trying to make something a little more unique. As such, I've decided to take an unconventional view of the project requirements. I'm not even sure if the idea will work, and I will have to run with it to find out.
When I first read the contest rules I immediately started trying to think of ways to submit something unique. I realized that the locomotion method was going to be the same for most of the submissions, and this is when I got a crazy idea.
This led me to the design I hope to successfully build: a menacing crawler, which led to the next idea — a SUPER cheesy movie! Thus the cheesy design and project name "CD Avenger" was born :D
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