Thursday, May 8, 2008

Maker Faire Interview

While at Maker Faire last weekend we did a lot of talking with people about how to build droids. It stands mentioning because usually at Con's people just love R2 for who he is, they get their pics and move on. They don't really consider what it takes to make him work, or anything.

While Chris was on break I did this interview in his place. Gerard didn't want to get in front of the camera, so he just pointed them to me (I guess he already has my personality nailed). I just thought I would share my moment in the sun with my readers (all 2 of you). Please forgive the sound levels. It was a noisy warehouse and required talking loudly to be heard, which would have been fine if they had done some editing for the final product.



Here is another one from Education Day.

2 comments:

Nicolas said...

You have done a great job with the body. I wonder what could be done to make it autonomous if the programming was open sourced. You could look after the mechanics and you could let the rest of the Internet community program it.

You might end up with a working droid without the need for controlling it remotely?

Steve Simmons said...

Thanks for the ideas Nick. There is a group of people who talk through the various ways of making R2 atonomous. The easiest would be to take the "smart" parts out of the voice activated toy version.

In the end we all shy away from doing it because it would be scary to have 200lbs metal cruising around on its own. The potential damage to house, children and droid could get really ugly.