Bitbeam

It’s been a busy few months in Bitbeam land. For lots of reasons, I’m now the proud owner of a Lulzbot AO-101 3D Printer. I ordered it on Tuesday, received it today, and I’m already printing beams. Here’s a quick peak at the results!

I used the “Bitbeam RP Printable” version of Bitbeam by Wildseyed.

Some tests to verify that bitbeambot is working well — mechanically, electronically, and software-ly.

Okay, that tweet will probably be on my Top 10 Awesome Moments of 2011 list. But let’s back up for a second. How’d we get here?

On October 2nd, I presented my Angry Birds playing robot at the Jenkins User Conference in San Francisco. You can watch the video on YouTube, fast forwarded to the roboty bits at 14:25.

[The conference video doesn’t cut away from me while I narrate the two robot demo videos. But all is not lost! You can enjoy the two demo links here and here. Oh, and the slides, here.]

Weeks before the conference, I announced that I would unveil the bitbeam robot in my talk. Not satisfied with a mere Worldwide Premiere, I decided BitbeamBot deserved a Galactic Premiere. I used this as motivation to actually finish building the robot. I call this “Embarrassment Driven Development — make a big public promise to deliver on a deadline or risk embarrassment. Let me tell you, EDD works. Just a few hours before my conference talk, I was still furiously testing circuits and writing code, trying to get it all to work. But I pulled it off. I got the demo working, recorded a quick video of it working on my desk, then sprinted over to the conference to give my talk.

The talk went well. A good time was had by all. Okay, so the next day, I was scheduled to talk with Tim O’Brien from O’Reilly about Selenium. Still fired up by the success at JenkinsConf, I convinced Tim to let me talk about my robot. (He really had no choice, though. I was talkin’ robots with or without him.)

The interview is up on YouTube, and Tim posted his summary on O’Reilly Radar.

A few day’s later, Mr. O’Reilly himself posted that tweet.

And he lived happily ever after. The End!

bitPad is an inexpensive and easy to build iPad stand made with Bitbeam. Although it’s very simple, it shows you some of the fun things you can do with Bitbeam.

Here are the parts you need:

• 3 27U Bitbeam beams
• 2 13U Bitbeam beams
• 6 1-inch long 10-32 machine screws (phillips pan-head, fine thread, zinc)
• 6 10-32 machine screw hex nuts (fine thread, zinc)

It’s popular with the kids!

I posted more detailed assembly pictures to the bitPad photo set on Flickr.

When I started the Bitbeam project in July, I didn’t focus on how to make money from it. It was more of an art project that had to get out of my head and into the real world. However, people keep asking me when I’m going to start selling kits. I’m pretty busy these days with my awesome startup, but I think it might be fun to make a few Bitbeam kits, get ’em out in the world, and start growing the Bitbeam community. So, if you’re interested in buying a bitPad kit, please provide your email address in the form below. Kits are $6. Shipping for up to 4 kits is $5 to anywhere in the USA. (It would make an excellent stocking stuffer!) I’ll probably keep the first batch limited to about 25 kits. So act now! 🙂

My robot plays Angry Birds. Does yours? 

I created this robot for my “Extreme Testing with Selenium and Jenkins” talk at the Jenkins User Conference, on October 2, 2011.

Oh, and it looks like Bitbeambot is now #1 on the Robots That Play Angry Birds leaderboard, too!