These are all the 3D printing files for creating your own RoboBrrd! You can download the .stl files and get printing right away and also view the dimensional drawings. Check out the webpage!

The dream of having RoboBrrd as a widespread toy all around the world is what is really motivating us. OSHW combined with availability of 3D printers, it can be possible!

One day, there will be more RoboBrrds in the world than Furbys, and everyone will make it themselves.

It seems odd that we go to a store to purchase a toy when we can create one ourselves. So let’s do it, and make a positive impact! Manufacture our own toys, customize them, learn about them, build them into robots, make them better.

We put a lot of effort into the webpage by making the pics look fun & groovy. With the 3D Viewer Mode, it’s great to be able to spin, zoom, rotate 3D files. Many people dismiss RoboBrrd as goofy/stupid/useless, so it is also nice to show the thought that went in to RoboBrrd.

On the technical side, creating the pieces to work with both the laser cut pieces and 3d pieces was interesting. The two variables were the extrusion width, and the kerf. Figuring out the extrusion width was straight forward- we measured the mdf with calipers, and they said 3.05mm. As for the kerf, it was exactly +0.2mm different than the laser cut ones. Funnily enough, the laser cut kerf adjustment was -0.1mm, which meant all that needed to be changed was the – sign to a + sign.

There is a donation button on the webpage, which will help us to create even more robots. Each donation will come with a ‘RoboBrrd Name Card’ that you can fill out and give to your newly created RoboBrrd. If you do donate, thanks a bunch!

Well, what are you waiting for? LET’S GO PRINT A ROBOBRRD!

They are waiting, just glued together

Some of them have been painted now

Here they are drying their nice coat of gloss. Look at all of the beaks!

This was bad. We were trying to get the top face on, but it must have been stuck by some excess glue, gloss, or paint. Nothing we were trying was working, and the slots were already carved out with a knife. Standing on it seemed like a good idea, and worked for the previous Brrds. Except for this one. We were really upset about this

Here are all of the Brrds so far

Rivets installed, wing servos added

Red RoboBrrd takes a break to enjoy looking at a multimeter

Time to solder up all of these RGB LEDs and their resistors. This part is so mind-numbing and boring.

Soldered up, labeled, and with heat shrink

It took us ages to make all of these… phew!

Soldering up the LDR, resistor, and wires

Installing front face onto Blue RoboBrrd

Wiring up Black RoboBrrd

More LEDs to wire! AAAH!

The CTV RoboBrrd was sitting around doing nothing… painted it PINK!

Time for the TMP36 and Piezo speakers!

Remade Orange RoboBrrd

Black RoboBrrd is set up, calibrated, and working!

That is it for the progress so far. Much of the time gets chewed up in the little things. Here is a list of fine details that no one will know about, except the custom RoboBrrd, myself, and now you the reader!

• Excess glue was carefully taken away
• Lighter colours were two coats of paint
• Gloss was added everywhere on the Brrd (except the Skotch-Yoke pieces)
• Gloss left to dry for 24h
• Slots & holes ‘careved’ out from excess gloss & paint with knife
• Actually got a blister on my finger from all the carving
• Test fitting and more carving is done
• Adding heat shrink and labels to all the wires
• Twist wires by hand for neatness, and add additional electrical tape

It takes time to create a RoboBrrd. Hopefully you will appreciate the time & effort spent into the them. We really care about the Brrds, and it’s the same amount of effort that we put into our own as well. It’s pretty tough trying to stay focused on them, especially when there are quite a few to create! We’re aiming for the end of this weekend to finish them, but we’ll see how it goes.

Back to building the Brrds! ^_^ CHIRP!

If you didn’t catch the little snippet of RoboBrrd on TV because of the rush of the holidays, no worries- here is the recording! RoboBrrd starts at the 0:58 mark.

Mega thanks to Christine Long (@CTVChristine) for the interview snippet, and SpikenzieLabs (@SpikenzieLabs) for letting us set up there and use their laser cutter

It’s great to see DIY robots on TV and spreading the word to even more people. Perhaps people who never thought about building robots will now be inspired to do so now!

RoboBrrd loves chirping on TV

Check out the recording!

Last night was the final countdown for the RoboBrrd Indiegogo campaign, we surpassed our stretch goal!

Big thanks to all the new and old friends of RoboBrrd, for backing the project and/or spreading the word!

We will be keeping everyone in the loop as to what is happening, and we will be posting pics and vids of the behind the scenes action on twitter/facebook/g+, so you can follow RoboBrrd!

If you have any questions about RoboBrrd feel free to ask them!

It is extremely exciting to be able to get RoboBrrd in the hands of even more people now. I can’t wait to see what people will be making with them!

YIPEE WOOT WOOT CHIRP CHIRP BEEP BLOOP WHIRR SQUAWK!

Thanks again!

Thanks everyone for the support so far, it has been a blast! Time to spend the last few hours in crazy anticipation

As you might have seen in the teaser video from last week, we were working on an application called RoboBrrd Dashboard. Now, it is available as Beta 1! Check out the video overview:

This was made entirely in Processing with controlP5. It was quite straight forward to code it, the things that took the most time were in the details, like positioning, colours, and buttons. It also writes to an xml file, to save your current theme and servo positions. Handy!

Here is a screenshot:

RoboBrrd enjoys being calibrated with RoboBrrd Dashboard!

You can download it over at robobrrd.com/dashboard! It’s open source, check out the Github repo!

This is version Beta 1, so let us know if you find any bugs so that we can fix them

Help spread the word of RoboBrrd on Indiegogo and share the inspiration of robotics! Thanks!

Today we just got in the RoboBrrd Brain Boards! They look great, going to be soldering one up pretty soon!

More updates soon to come! w00t w00t!

There’s only 8 days left in the campaign! Still time for more RoboBrrds

Thanks all for the help so far!

Here we are laser cutting a RoboBrrd and I’m explaining what is happening.

^ pic from SpikenzieLabs

For the occasion, we laser cut a special raster RoboBrrd:

As well as some CTV RoboBrrd tokens:

The rastering effect was quite interesting. In the Illustrator file, the colours of the shapes were the same as the CTV Logo, but it looks like the laser cutter took the brightness of each colour and based off of that either rastered more or less. This would be interesting to play around with if I ever got my own laser cutter

I’m totally psyched to start getting the pieces that make up a RoboBrrd! I spent a lot of time organizing what parts I needed to buy and from where. Here are some of the McMaster-Carr parts!

Wow, they are very instructive with their packaging:

Here’s one of my favourite parts! Rivets for the wings! Windell showed me these when I was an Artist in Residence at Evil Mad Science (which was totally AWESOME)! The rivets are sweet and they do the trick great!

And also rivets that fit the beak now too, so you don’t have to snap off the wing rivets! Woohoo!

These are the screws that go through the pcb and into some mounting posts. They’re 6-32 sized. I don’t really know much about screw sizes, so I ended up choosing that size and it’s ok.

The piano wire for the wings… cool!

So when I got back to the lab afterwards, I wanted to test out everything. This happened:

Turns out the screws that I ordered to go through the material and into the other side of the mounting post were too short.

Blah. This was my error! Fail! I need them to be 1/4″ instead of 3/16″. I have 4 of these boxes that are useless now…

As far as mounting goes, this is how tall it is:

There is a lot of room to access the plugs on the board, and even run wires out the back if you want!

These RGB piranha LEDs are nice and bright, and great for the googely eyes on RoboBrrds. When you attach the eye with hotglue to the LED, the little nub dents in a little, then the square around it supports the eye some more. In comparison to the 5mm LEDs, these result in less accidental pop-offs of the eyes.

Here was one of the fancier RoboBrrd designs. I added in some slots on the top face to put in some spikey mohawk pieces.

A spikey front face as well… Going to paint it all up and it can take over SpikenzieLabs and annoy everyone

Apart from this, I’ve been getting some surprises from the amount of fees that there is. I remember there was one transaction that had so many extras on it, like federal tax, provincial tax, USD to CAD in Paypal (and if you do this in Paypal, it is NOT at par! arrg!), and then another transaction fee.

Oh yeah, and I based all of the components off of digikey.COM rather than .CA … so now I have to spend 4 hours on the spreadsheets again and redo it all for Canadian pricing.

The less “rookie mistake” variables that get messed up, the more could go towards a laser cutter.

It’s really frustrating to know that every single mistake within production that you make will have a future impact on whatever you do next. The repercussions of the mistakes no longer involve a ‘learning experience’ and ‘future improvement’, because now all the mistakes have to do with money and time. So if you make a mistake, there’s absolutely nothing positive about it.

(Note: this is different for mistakes in research & general goofing hacking)

More of the components will probably be arriving soon, it’s going to be a lot of fun to try them out! I will keep everyone posted on the latest updates and everything!

Thanks again to SpikenzieLabs for taking the extra time for the CTV interview and for the space to set it all up!

And yeah, from all of the ‘kit businesses’ places that I’ve seen, behind the divider theirs is the messiest. (I didn’t even see that they had a drill press until Tuesday!) Not that messy is a bad thing though.

More updates to come, thanks everyone for helping to spread the word for RoboBrrd on Indiegogo!

Really hope that we can meet the next funding goal!