Halloween 2009

Pumpkin carved, Batteries charged, and R2 ready to go out trick er treating tonight. Our robot pumpkin turned out pretty cool although I can't take credit for the idea. It's similar to a pumpkin I saw on one of my favorite websites (Robotsnob.com) a week or so ago. Very appropriate for our house even though I don't plan on having any other robots out tonight other than R2. And R2 will be out in the neighborhood. I was going to drag B9 or Robby over to the front door but my back's a little sore and yanking them monsters around wouldn't do it much good so our little robot pumpkin is going to have to fill in.

I also removed the bus stop robots from the front porch to keep kids from yanking their arms and legs off. Most of the kids are very good but it just takes one or two to mess things up. One kid last year started wildly beating R2 over the dome with his bag of candy. Sugar high no doubt but at least an adult stopped him before he did any damage. Tomorrow we'll be bringing R2 to The "Star Wars in Concert" which is endorsed by Lucasfilms. We'll be with the 501st which will be a ball and we're looking forward to it.

Out of the country for awhile

October was a busy month and not much done in the building department. We did a last minute trip to Ireland and had a great time. With Halloween coming up, I decided to redo the back door because it just didn't fit correctly. There was a gap and it rode a little too high. Plus the paint job on the rear door wasn't very good and it needed to be sanded down and prepped better.

This was on my mind for the last couple weeks so the first thing I did when I got back was removed the power coupler from the rear door as that was my number one suspect on why the door rode too high. Nope, that wasn't the culprit. It turns out the pegs I have in the frame that the door slides onto were hitting the bottoms of the coin returns. So after removing the pegs I cut about 3/8 of an inch from them and now the door fits much better. The power couplers will be fairly easy to re-attach with a fresh tube of glue.

Doors are primed and ready for some final coats of paint. This weekend R2 went back out to the garage and to go for a long walk to do last minute checking of the drive systems. All systems go for Halloween.

The inspiration

Markku Lahdemaki created the beautiful robot artwork which was the inspiration for my next big robot project. I "hope" to build robots similar to his design although I may take some liberties in a few areas and the finish unfortunately won't be shiny like his. It would be nice for them to be shiny but being outdoor robots they probably will end up with a greenish patina finish. Plus I was thinking about putting army boots on them for the feet. Not sure how that would weather in the Florida moisture though.

It would be nice to build a family of them for our backyard. One robot (the Dad) will be pushing an old fashioned push lawn mower while the other two (mom and daughter) will be holding Flower pots with flower in them. So that's the plan at this stage which can be completely changed around depending upon my whims and building abilities. The following are pictures by the very cool artist Markku Lahdemaki which were my inspiration. His website is at http://www.markkuphoto.com if you are interested in purchasing his artwork.