If you haven’t gotten your tickets, you will be able to pick them up at the door. Doors will open at 10am with a bit of time for folks to have some coffee and say hello before we get the show on the road at 10:30.
Here’s a map of the location:
See you there!
Botacon is a gathering of roboticists and robot enthusiasts to discuss the future. Themed “Robots For A Better Future,” the day is set up to explore both the practical and philosophical aspects facing robots today.
We are excited to announce the schedule and look forward to seeing you on Saturday! (This schedule is subject to change)
9:00 AM Load in. Volunteers arrive and help set up
10:00 AM Doors open and tickets are available
10:30 AM Opening remarks
11:00 AM Ilan Moyer – Gestural Design: Product Design in an Age of Personal Fabrication
In the 1980′s, desktop publishing empowered ordinary people with no typographic training to produce beautiful documents which rivaled the work of professionals. Product design is now poised on the precipice of a similarly pivotal transition. In a manner analogous to the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter in 1985, low-cost personal fabricators such as the Makerbot are on a trajectory towards placing a means of professional-level production in the hands of individuals. However, a piece is still missing. Equally important to the Macintosh and the LaserWriter in the birth of desktop publishing were programs such as PageMaker and MacPublisher – tools which automated the highly skilled profession of typesetting. Will the birth of “”desktop product design”" look similar to that of desktop publishing? Can the arts and skills of mechanical and electrical engineering, industrial design, and programming be automated and abstracted so that the ordinary person can wield their powers when designing their own products? Or will our perception of what constitutes a product change to match our abilities? Based on my work in product design, personal fabrication, and machine design, I would like to address these questions and share with you the lessons that I’ve learned through my struggle to design products for an audience of one.
11:20 AM Mr.Kim and John Sarik – Makerbot Printable Transistors and OLEDs
Printable transistors and OLEDs are possible today. We want people to go home and start working on building transistors! This talk covers the essential info needed for you to get started. First, a visit to the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics where transistors are printed today. Then we go dumpster diving at Arts and Crafts stores and your local super market for possible alternatives. Finally, we present our progress and experiences printing with Makerbots and welcome others to join our cause.
11:40 AM Kio Stark – 9 Ways to Make Your Robot Come to Life
I’ll explain 9 strategies for successfully anthropomorphizing robots. How it looks matters, but what’s exciting is that it matters a lot less than things like responsiveness, timing, movement quality, sensitivity to input, and other variables. Using data from humanoid robotics experiments, I’ll show you how you can enhance the illusion that your Bot lives!
12:00 Noon Dustyn Roberts – 3D without the glasses: Making assemblies of parts
One of the comments mentioned “designing multi-part assemblies” as a good tutorial topic. So I’d like to help out! Using Alibre Design, a free to try – cheap to buy modeling software, I’ll talk about why you would want to go 3D in the first place, what the basic landscape looks like, and how to make assembly files with individual parts to make sure everything fits together.
12:20 PM Quick Talks – Five speakers will each give a five minute talk on a variety of topics.
1PM Break for lunch – Not Ray’s Pizza Sponsored by MakerBot Industries
2PM Heather Knight – Robotic Touch: Using Capacitive Sensing to understand Human Body Language.
Touch is one of the most intimate of our senses. Our strongest emotional bonds, with lovers, pets, children or fellow sportsmen, are highly tactile. It is archaic. It is innate. An unobtrusive tap on the shoulder from a waitress will result in higher tips, even if people don’t remember that it occurred. The Sensate Bear is an exploration of this elusive sensation as part of the Huggable project at the MIT Media Lab. Fifty-six capacitive sensors cover its pink foam surface; they are tuned to interpolate between each other and can sense contact through a teddybear fur. Let us introduce and lead you on a tour of this handmade robot. For example, we chose capacitive sensors because they respond to people but not to inanimate objects. You can make a touch-sensing robot too! Learn some basic techniques, get jazzed up about analog sensing and get ready to implement some basic pattern recognition algorithms!
2:20 PM Zach Smith – Compilers of Industrial Revolution 2
3D Printers are the physical equivalent of software compilers. They are going to play a pivotal role in the future of the Open Source Hardware movement, or as we like to call it: Industrial Revolution 2. There is much yet to be done, and this is a frontier with many challenges to face. These are challenges you can solve and become a rockstar of the open source hardware community in the process. Do you want in?
2:40 PM George Hart – Cool Geometric Forms
Robotic layered assembly is revolutionizing what can be made in the world of cool geometric forms. George will show some of his experiments with the technology of the recently possible in 3D printing.
3:00 PM Ben Combee – Put a Web Server on Your Bot!
There are many advantages of putting your robot on the web by having it run a webserver. I’ll talk about applications of the Webduino code and why this is an effective way to get data from your robot or issue it commands.
3:20 PM Rob Gilson – State of the Replicators
A discussion of the future of self-replicating additive machines. Printable electro-magnets, circuitry, super-strength printed titanium, and the inevitable replicator industrial revolution that will follow. This is a look at both existing state of the art replicators and the future, where we will use the iterated progression of this technology to revolutionize everything. The open source 3D printer will be the biggest disruptive technology of the next hundred years. This talk will outline how it will happen in the next decade.
3:40 PM Erik de Bruijn – Open source innovation: On empowerment, architecture and ecosystems
It is unprecedented that the distributed phenomenon of open source development is thriving in hardware as it does in open 3D printing. It is an empowering technology, that can be used in many ways, both by fueling other innovations and by furthering the development of fabrication technologies themselves. The powerful co-existence of user-founded businesses and the embedded/embedding communities, only highlights the importance of good architecture where collaboration is facilitated. In this talk, Erik will present results from his RepRap research, provide (some) theory and invite you to collaboratively reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of current and future platforms to best catalyze the massive potential that our communities have.
4:00 Laura Greig – Helping Paintbots Become More Than Printers
It is easy to offend a traditional painter with any attempt to teach a robot to paint: surely painting is too human an act to emulate with technology. It requires soul and emotion and all those mysterious properties that keep robots and animals on the intellectual sidelines. Likewise, it is easy to offend a technologist with a traditional art class: the lessons are wishy-washy, everything is permissible, and anyone lacking innate talent is doomed to failure. Paintbots considerate (and critical) of both these camps have a better chance of survival in the world. I have made an effort to systematize what I’ve learned in years of traditional art classes, museum trips and art history books, according to the way I’ve seen sophisticated AI behave. The central strategies employed by the best painters (patience, steadiness, repetition, pattern-recognition, chemical analysis, etc) play to robots’ strengths. Art can be as rigorous and empirical a discipline as any other and I would like to see more robots taking it seriously.
4:20 Iem Heng and Andy Zhang – Autonomous and Non-Autonomous Flexible Robot
Our Flexible Robot is a unique robot. It is comprised of a novel combination of off-the-shelf items, as primary components, with some additional components designed and fabricated by ourselves at the college machine shop. One human could operate a squad of these devices, allowing most to perform their function and attending only to those which may require assistance. It will provide a stable platform from which it may perform its ancillary functions. These might include: explosives removal, lifting or shifting of heavy material (as in forestry, mining or rubble removal), or in the delivery of life and property saving equipment, sensors and communication in locations where there would be possible great harm to humans performing these tasks. Moreover, as devices, one person could supervise a team of such robots, enhancing productivity and safety of the operator.
4:40 PM Closing remarks
5:00 PM Mingling and cleanup
6:00 PM Self organize dinner with your robot friends in Brooklyn
9:00 PM Drinkup – Location to be announced. Beer sponsored by Make: Magazine
Make: Magazine, which spotlights fantastic makers and work in the maker community will be sponsoring Botacon. Expect to see lots of magazines around at the event and some Make: Magazine sponsored beer at the drinkup after the event!
Make: Magazine loves robots and we at Botacon recommend that every roboticist get a subscription!
Things are heating up in the robot world. Botacon approaches. We’re happy to announce the speakers at this first ever Botacon! Get your tickets now!
Heather Knight – Robotic Touch: Capacitive Sensing to Understand Human Body Language
Rob Gilson – State of the Replicators
Chris Connors – MakerBot and emerging technologies in the classroom
Dustyn Roberts – 3D without the Glasses: Making Assemblies of Parts
Laura Greig – Helping Paintbots Become More Than Printers
Kio Stark – 9 Ways to Make Your Robot Come to Life
Ben Combee – Put a Web Server on Your Bot
Erik de Bruijn – Open source innovation: On empowerment, architecture and ecosystems
Mr.Kim and John Sarik – Makerbot Printable Transistors and OLEDs
George Hart – Cool Geometric Forms
Zach Smith – Compilers of Industrial Revolution 2
Ilan Moyer – Gestural Design: Product Design in an Age of Personal Fabrication
Iem Heng and Andy Zhang – Autonomous and Non-Autonomous Flexible Robot
Amy Hurst – Nickel for Scale – automatically customizing 3D objects to fit YOU!
Adam Mayer – Tiny Robots Everywhere
MakerBlock – How to be a robot dad
New!: Raphael Abrams – The Nine Step Program to Make a Robot Puppet that Will Haunt Your Dreams
This is shaping up to be THE conference about DIY and amateur robotics and the bright future for automated everything. Be there!
Jordan Miller and Nick Starno of MakerBot Industries will be manning a Robot Fixing Clinic at Botacon. Bring your sad machines in and they’ll check them out, offer advice and if possible, help you fix them!
Dr. Jordan Miller is a founder of the Hive76 hackerspace in Philadelphia and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His research in the department of Bioengineering combines chemistry and rapid prototyping to direct cultured human cells to form more complex organizations of living vessels and tissues. Jordan helped develop the MakerBot heated build platform and is an active contributor to MakerBot and RepRap.
Nick Starno is MakerBot’s mechanical engineer and innovation technologist. He’s a wizard with solidworks and a pro at creating things with 3D printers.
Jeff Rutzky, origami and craft robo ninja, will also be set up at this bot-clinic showing the latest in “pimp-your-bot” projects to take your 3D printer to the next level.
Have you been considering giving a talk at Botacon? Submit your talk before November 23rd! We’ll announce the lineup shortly after that!
Submit your talk by filling in this form by November 23rd!
A new day is dawning for robotics. The tools of manufacturing have been democratized and robots have become modular and configurable. It is easier than ever to make your own robots.
This conference will shine a spotlight on this fresh approach to robotics and the roboticists that are building a better tomorrow through automation. The day will be have talks, demonstrations, explanations, and robotic wisdom.
This first inagural Botacon has the theme “Robots for a Better Future.” You are invited to submit your talk about your pet robot project, your innovations in robotic stepper controllers, your sweet software for controlling two robotic arms at once or things you can make with a robot that make the world a better place. If you’ve got a tutorial or some wisdom to share, submit it here as a talk. While the audience will be heavily skewed towards MakerBot Operators, you are invited to submit your talk on anything robot related.
NOTE: If you have another idea that is not a talk, please submit it too. You want to have a MakerBot Car Gravity Derby and make a track and bring it for people to race? Cool! We’ll consider it! Click here to submit.
Get your tickets to Botacon 0 today! The date and location are locked in for Botacon 0. This will be a historic event focused on the theme “Robots for a Better Future”.
It will happen at the Brooklyn Lyceum on December 11th. Doors will open at 10am and the program will run from 11am to 5:30 followed by time to hang out until 6:30. Sandwiches for lunch are included in the ticket price.
This will be THE event to get together with robot enthusiasts and cutting edge roboticists. We expect that there will be a lot of MakerBot Operators in the crowd sharing 3D printing strategies and showing off their latest 3D models.
The basic idea is as follows
* A keynote speaker in the morning
* A bunch of small talks and discussions (anywhere from 5-15 minutes)
* About 2 hours for lunch
* A workshop project
* Some more talks and discussions
* Time for people to get dinner
* A bar drinkup
We’re looking for ideas to make Botacon 0 great. Please submit a talk!
Check it out. Now you can learn about sponsorship and volunteer opportunities at Botacon! Contact us, if you’re interested!
Survey results have already started pouring in and there are some good suggestions! Here are the first ones! (If billions roll in, I’ll just pick out the unique ones to post.)
John Abella #1136 suggests:
A session on tweaking and tuning skeinforge (get dave durant to help? we can coax him)
Calling Dave Durant! First human to get a shoutout!
MakerBot #1602 suggests:
alcohol
Don’t worry #1602. Brooklyn will take care of us humans in this regard.
Anderson Ta #1727 suggests:
Sharing knowledge of our bots, sharing profiles, tweaking our bots. Just to be able to leave with lots of useful knowledge in regards to our bots. It would be a place for everyone to share there tips and tricks that would better everyone.
MakerBot #620 wins the awesome suggestion prize by suggesting:
* Live demos of various kits, like the Thing-o-matic, ABP, Frostruder, Unicorn, Cyclops, etc. You could probably sell quite a few kits this way as well.
* Presentations that take current operators “under the hood” on the electronics. Anyone who has built a MakerBot knows how the device functions mechanically, but the electronics are a black box to many of us. I’d love to know how the boards communicate with each other, what the hardware features (used and unused) are, where the design tradeoffs were, and learn how to start hacking on the electronics more. Discussion of the (by then) newly released Gen4 electronics vs. the Gen3 electronics would also be fascinating.
* Coding sprints for ReplicatorG or one of the skeinforge replacements. I think many MakerBot operators have coding experience and would like to contribute. (For example, I’m a physicist/programmer who got into 3D printing as a hobby to help expand my limited mechanical expertise.) Starting the session with an overview of how to the code is structured to orient new developers is very important. Quite likely there will be limited actual progress on the software during the sprint, but you’ll send home a batch of potential new software contributors.
* Tutorials of interest to MakerBot operators would be fun. Quick sessions on Sketchup, MeshLab, OpenSCAD, Blender, SkeinForge, etc would be very cool. Depending on speaker expertise, sessions on higher level topics like “designing multi-part assemblies” could be very helpful.
* Round-table discussion/brainstorming session future areas of innovation like “stepper driven extruders,” “improving print reliability,” “3D scanning,” “Frostruder applications,” or “multiple extruder/toolhead possibilities.” Starting the discussion sessions with brief presentations from community members with some expertise in the area is key to creating focused, useful discussions. Maybe 30 minutes of quick talks followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the speakers would be sufficient to explore one of these topics.
* Merch table selling parts, especially if they are generic spare bits like metric screw assortments, bearings, smooth and threaded rods, stepper motors, small tools, wire, etc. Buying small quantities of these items is a huge pain online and they are often hard to find locally. I would love to be able to buy a custom assortment of screws and nuts by the pound, and supplement with other specific items.
(Mostly, to summarize the theme here: If you can help “upgrade” the skills of current operators, then the innovation in the community goes up as well. Plus, it’s a lot of fun!)
Peter DePasquale – #315 (I think….) is considering giving a talk about:
Using ‘bot for generating tactile images for the blind.
Ok, stay tuned to this ‘bot station for more info!
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