Two weeks ago DON-8r and I where invited along to Robots Live!, an event at the National Museum of Flight in East Lothian. It featured, amongst other exhibitions, battling bots from TV show Robot Wars, physicists from The University of Edinburgh (if I remember rightly…), football playing robots (expertly programmed to keep falling over, they were uncanny) and various workshops for electronics, aliens and hula hooping.
It was pretty great, felt to me like an up scaled Pop-up Science Museum!
I had been invited along a few months ago, the mention of Robot Wars competitors was the hook for me. Unfortunately my top 5 bots from the show – Razer, Hypno-disk, Chaos 2, Wheely Big Cheese and Tornado – weren’t there but the ones they had where incredible! It was amazing, and bloody noisy, to see a 100kg+ block of metal get flipped 6ft into the air!
On a slightly tamer note though, this was the first real opportunity for DON-8r to flaunt its stuff. A jam packed event focussing on robots full of excited kids and equally excited adults. Over the 6 hours DON-8r was there it raised around £40 and only needed 1 change of battery. I think that if I can upgrade DON-8r so that it reacts differently to different values of coin then I can encourage larger denominations of donation than 1p and 2p coins. Then who knows how much it could raise!
I was discussing with one of the managers there about my thoughts on manufacturing and selling/renting more DON-8r’s and the thoughts were that if I can produce them to sell for around about £400 - £500 that’s only 12ish big events and its made its money back for the charity.
Something to think about anyway… I am considering applying for some funding via Starter For 6 to get something off the ground. However, as I write this I am on the train down to London on my way to exhibit at the New Designers exhibition in Islington. A chance for recent graduates from varying design fields across UK university’s to show of their stuff to industry types with the hope of acquiring some certainty as to what they’ll be doing for the next few months. So bearing that in mind I am keeping my options open and optimistic this week.
I’ll update in my next post a when I have been working on for the past fortnight – a newspaper for Product Design Dundee at New Designers promoting the work of the exhibiting students, the research department among other bits and bobs. You may recognise the recycled front cover…
For the time being though here’s some of the (slightly shaky) photos I took of DON-8r at Robots Live! Thanks to Bryony and the team at National Museums of Scotland for giving me this great opportunity!
