I Make Things

What do you get when you combine a capacitor, some LEDs, and a solar cell? A B.E.A.M. Bug Bot! B.E.A.M. stands for Biology Electronics Aesthetics Mechanics which means that the robots are inspired by biology which means bugs.

Vic De Leon and Stewart Tansly, explained that the solar cell doesn’t put out enough power to drive the motor, but the capacitor can gather power and then release it. A capacitor works kind of like a glass of water, but instead of filling with water, it fills with electricity. When the glass is full, it dumps out the electricity. Photography flashes use big capacitors that gather electricity and then dump it out in the form of a flash.

One of the interesting things about these bugs is that they are set up with light sensors so that they are always going toward the light! Now that’s a clever little cute ecologically-friendly solar-powered robot!

Mark Tilden’s work inspired Vic and Stewart to make their bugbots. You can make one too! Both Solarbotics and Pagermotors.com have kits that have all the bits and bobs you need to put a little B.E.A.M. bugbot together!

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This is the first of a series of many videos covering the Maker Faire for Make Magazine!

Are you curious about the robot that Pablos and 3ric were designing in a recent video podcast? They completely redesigned it to make the “hackerbot.” Their robot ended up looking like a spinning double sided axe.

Inspired by their robot, and Rich’s advice, I made my own robot. While most robots use titanium or airplane grade alluminum, I chose a different strategy to protect my robot.

The googly eyes and a wireless transmitting video camera made it complete.


Here’s an image from the camera. This is my little robots POV and it’s looking at a robot that is on it’s way to come and tear my robot up. It was unable to get to the vulnerable parts of my robot, but it did manage to saw a slot through the foam all around my robot and shred the transmitting video camera. There were no hard feelings. When you put a robot in the cage, you have to expect that your going to home with what Pablos called, “a bag of shrapnel.”

With so much damage, I had to really work to keep my robot competitive. With red and black tape and a whole lot of lexan and some titanium donated by Rob Farrow, my robot changed from a pink eggbot into a lady bug. Make sure to watch the video all the way to the end to find out if my little robot really is the little robot that could!

I had a lot of help on this project. Big thanks go out to Jennifer Rundle and Grendel for helping with camera operation while I was competing. All the great robot enthusiasts of Western Allied Robotics were super nice, helpful and encouraging. You can see more photos of the event here and here and here. The black and white polaroid photograph at the top of the article was taken by Billy Hatcher

In between robot battles at Seattle Bot Battle IV, I got a chance to interview Scott Ferguson about his computer controlled CNC etchasketch. He can make his computer control the etchasketch. Scott usually makes robots that kill other robots, but took up the kinetic art challenge for the event.

One of the things that impressed me is that Scott positioned the servos stepper motors so that he can use a big or a pocket etchasketch by just switching the pullies and changing the settings on his computer. He also wrote the program that controlls the Etcha Sketch.

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