First one we saw was Joel Greenberg showing off his nifty homemade mic zeppelin. According to my del.icio.us links, I read about this back in April, but didn’t realize he was from Austin. (Note to self: checkout his podcast )

Next up was Rich LeGrand and his Lego-bot with a Gameboy brain. Basically, he put an FPGA and some flash memory on a card that fits in the Gameboy Advance cartridge slot, which lets the GBA brain talk to sensors and motor controllers and cameras and all kinds of roboty goodness. For a demo, the bot spotted a loose lego piece, wheeled itself over, grabbed the piece, and moved it to the other side of the table. It was also able to learn and repeat and little dance — you push the thing around the table, and it senses the movement through the motors, records it, and plays it back. ( video! )

The Austin Robot Group had the last two presentations: Eric Lundquist explained the Babbling Head and had it sing a few songs, and Vern Graner demoed the controller board/prototype of a funky spin-art game-type-thing they’re making for the next First Night Austin.

All kinds of Neat Stuff[tm] .. we’ll have to go back next month. (I heard they had a homemade Tesla coil last month!) I managed to catch part of the evening with the voice recorder on my iAudio. I’ll try to clean it up and stick it online sometime in the next few days.

[tags] austin, austintx, geek, dorkbot, dorkbotaustin, nerd, robots, robotics[/tags]