Yesterday at hacklab I organized a robot hackathon, essentially a day-long effort to build an awesome robot at hacklab.to, my local hackerspace. We had about 10 people working on it at various times over the day, and we totally kicked ass: by about 5pm, we had track up and the robot moving back and forth under the control of it's Arduino. I had such a blast working with an awesome group of my friends, and I'm proud of the robot that we created. It still needs a lot of programming to make it super cool, but the basic mechanics are solid and even some of the sensors are in place. Basically, it a track-based robot with a winch. It rolls and forth, and can raise and lower a payload via a winch. Our envisioned goal is for it to be able to transport empty pop cans from the main table back to the recycling bins. We have all kinds of crazy schemes for adding personality to the beast, including a pan/tilt laser for an eye and an ability to make sounds like R2D2 :-).

Finally, a big shout out to Anne, to whom I gave my camera; she took this EPIC set of photos: Flickr: Robot Hackathon: Train Overlord. Even after deleting half the set just to make it more manageable and remove totally-redundant images, there are still 215 photos featuring everyone who contributed - I think it's the best photo-documented thing I have ever done. Thanks Anne!