Archive for the ‘Fun Stuff’ Category

Junkbot Competition Winners!

Monday, November 14th, 2016

First Place:

contestWinner
All the submissions to the junkbot competition were great, and we hope everyone had fun doing it! Our first place winner was Enigmatic Electronics with the Robot Grumpy Cat! We really loved this guy, and we’re likely to use it as inspiration in some RobotGeek projects. Watch the video, they put a lot of effort into it! They even did an unboxing video of the super mysterious robotics grab bag. It paid off doing it for the meme, so keep up the good work guys!

Runner-up:

Now we know we said there would be one winner, but we were torn because all of the submissions were so great. We had to pick out a runner-up because we just loved watching solenoids pop ping pong balls in every direction! Joesinstructables made not one, but two projects that include full instruction! The Arduino Ping Pong Ball Cannon fires ping pong balls in all directions (and we want one for the office), and the Arduino Ping Pong Pinball machine looks like a lot of fun!

Congrats, guys! Each of you will be receiving a $200.00 gift certificate to Trossen Robotics!

Thank you to all the participants, we’ll be doing more competitions soon!

Super Mysterious Robotics Grab Bag and Junkbot Competition!

Monday, August 22nd, 2016

newsletter

The Super Mysterious Robotics Grab Bag is a way for us to clean house and say thank you to our customers. Sometimes we end up with a surplus of parts that we just don’t know what to do with, so now we’re giving it away on the cheap! The Super Mysterious Robotics Grab Bag always comes with a large workbench, duino mount, RobotGeek LED Driver, RobotGeek Rotation Knob, RobotGeek Pushbutton, RobotGeek Sensor Shield, and the hardware you’ll need to mount it. What else is in the box? Everything from that point is a mystery. You’ll get well over $150 (retail) worth of robot parts to kick your creative processes into high gear!

Junkbot Competition:

We wanted to do something fun with this, so we’re going to have a junkbot competition! Winner takes a $200 Trossen Robotics Gift Card, and all the glory of having made a cute/funny/cool robot using a randomized selection of parts!

How to enter:

  • Purchase the Super Mysterious Robotics Grab Bag, and keep your order number
  • Build a robot that makes use of the parts in the Grab Bag
  • Put a video, pictures, blog post, or any other media you can think of that displays the best qualities of your robot online and send us a link at [email protected] with the subject line “Junkbot Competition”

Win!

  • A winner will be selected on September 26, so have your bot made and shared with us by then.
  • Winner will receive notification of their win, a $200 Trossen Robotics Gift Card, and a blog post showing off their creation!

Reactor Arm Smiley!

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016


Jeff Owrey of IntraVisions programmed a Reactor Arm to paint a smiley! This is a fun little project that demonstrates just a fraction of what you can do with a robot arm! There are a few really awesome projects on IntraVisions.com that you should check out after the video, such as the DIY Weather Station, DIY Radiation Monitor, and a few Javascript games such as Conway’s Game of Life! We had fun poking around these projects, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next!

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire was epic!

Thursday, May 26th, 2016

Geekbot Challenge
We had a great time at the Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire! As usual we brought the PhantomX Hexapod MK-III on a leash (always a crowd favorite), but everyone fell in love with the Geekbot V2 this year! We were there all day running an arena with kids piloting Geekbots to take as many balls as they could to the goal. We set up wireless first person view cameras on the Geekbots and control stations that utilized a combination of Wii Classic Controllers and Xbees at our booth, giving an awesome experience to anyone willing to step up to the challenge. With no prior experience with robotics, children were taking control of the arena with ease, and people came to watch, play, and learn about robotics all day! Seeing how the children interacted with the robots was heartwarming, to say the least. Check out the video that Kyle put together, and feel a little of what we felt that day!

makerFaire2016 from kamon mark on Vimeo.

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire 2016!

Monday, April 18th, 2016




Trossen Robotics will be at the Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire on Saturday, May 7th! This will be our fourth time attending, and we’re pumped to show off what we’ve been up to in the last year. We love inspiring people young and old to pursue an interest in robotics. We hope to see you there!

Ashton Kutcher will drop your phone from a RobotGeek Gripper

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016

full size bb8
What a sick, twisted world it is when Ashton Kutcher will drop your phone over a lie of omission. What horror exists in this disturbed mind that would take a benign gripper for use in such destructive ends? Why, of all things, would they measure the purity of a human being against the scales of carnage against a phone, hopelessly clung to by a gripper that would send it crashing headlong into the ground by the true force of gravity? We may never know, but it sure is entertaining to watch. If you have one of the discontinued RobotGeek Grippers featured in this video, we advise you that it may or may not be possessed by the evil spirit of Ashton Kutcher, and may or may not decide to drop your phone if you don’t tell your parents about the loss of your virginity. We can assure you that the new RobotGeek Parallel Gripper is not evil, so upgrade today!

Full size BB-8 Build!

Friday, February 5th, 2016

full size bb8
Star Wars fans, you’ve got to check this out. Instructable user ASCAS (Angelo) has made a full-size, app controlled BB-8 Droid. That in and of itself is cool, but Angelo has been kind enough to make an instructable so that you can build one too! This has gotten some discussion going around the office as to how we’re likely to make one. This is just awesome, and here’s to hoping this inspires many people to get involved with robotics!

Thomas the War Engine will Haunt Your Nightmares

Monday, January 18th, 2016

Kick the baby

Roboticist Y. Nakajima has produced one of the most creative, yet nightmare inducing incarnations of Thomas the Tank Engine quite possibly to have ever existed. As noted in the blog post announcing the existence of this robot, the name of this creation roughly translates to “Multi-legged Agency Tank Thomas”, and it has a mythology drawing from the Thomas the Tank Engine children’s show involving Sir Topham suffering from madness and obsession after a great war, and modifying the gentle Locomotive, adding legs and a radioactive death ray to be an agent of destruction. In reality, the robot stands about a foot tall, and is outfitted with a 300mw laser, which can do some pretty serious damage to human eyes, balloons, and matches. Watch the video if you would like to ruin your childhood and potentially never sleep again.

Full Size Humanoid Braces for Falls Using Its Hands

Friday, January 15th, 2016

Kick the baby

A group comprised of members of Carnegie Mellon University, The Robotics Institute, and the Advanced Robotics lab at IIT, have been kicking around a full size million dollar humanoid robot. Don’t worry, this robot is fully equipped to brace itself for the fall, much in the same way a human would. Upon having a force acting upon the robot, leading it into what would be a catastrophic fall, it will hold out its hands to brace itself against a wall. It even accurately pushes itself back into proper standing position! Check out the video. It’s impressive work, but you might feel bad for the robot.

Robot Wars is Back!

Wednesday, January 13th, 2016

Taking the Stairs

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the US series BattleBots getting a reboot, BBC has announced that Robot Wars is coming back to BBC2! After a decade of real robot battling blackout, 2016 is apparently a great year for robotic battle entertainment. If you want to enter your robotic creation into BattleBots fighting roster, check out the Rules and Entry page for all the details. Having just gotten the greenlight, details on entry to Robot Wars has yet to be announced. In the meantime, you can check out some savage battle footage from the original Robot Wars series.