(Hopefully this will become a habit every time Solarbotics does an event)
A huge rear-projection screen fed via 3 videocams let everybody have a great view of the action, and their very professional sumo-stage (black and red - very sharp) was well used for the Japanese, Mini, Micro, and Nano sumo events.
Held at the Grants Pass Fairgrounds, we were in a nice, large open room. The first day's highlight was the rental combat-robot arena, where you could buy time bashing combat robots. No, I didn't participate, as I was too busy with other stuff.
Jon Peterman put together some pre-assembled solarengines, and had $6 workshops building Symets. This was definitely a labour of love, and he spent most of the weekend helping kids with their projects.
I bumped into a few LANL workshop alumni, like Casey Holmes, and ...(sorry, name slipped my mind!). They were mainly working on micro and nanosumo robots, which are really coming along, and quite impressive in speed and capability. It's that whole size/mass thing. You can drop a bug 2 flights and it bounces and runs away, but try that with a .
We hung out with Al Margolis at his booth, hobbyengineering.com for most of the event. He was the first (well, him and Steve Jones of Bug'n'bots) to see the Sumovore kit in person. Hold tight, we'll have it online in the next day or so. I've got some documentation tweaks to make first.
Speaking of mini-sumo, StrongBad did it again, winning 1st place against the legendary Goliath in a 2-1 match. Sumovore did pretty decent too, until it had to meet up against StrongBad. Check out the video sub-gallery to see the results.
We nosed around the Parallax and Junun booths too. They've both got some pretty snazzy stuff in. There were a squadron of Parallax Toddlers with bluetooth communication for synchronized "marching band" movements, and Junun has some new cool Sharp IR distal sensors. So did the MegaBitty guys (cool IR distal sensors, that is).
That's about it for now. Feel free to leave comments on the gallery!
Regards, Dave (the weary traveller) Hrynkiw
See you in Edmonton next week, and Seattle in 2 weeks!