RoboBrrd will be on television soon! Not sure what date exactly yet, but on Tuesday we were interviewed by Christine Long from CTV Montreal at SpikenzieLabs all about RoboBrrd!
Here we are laser cutting a RoboBrrd and I’m explaining what is happening.
^ pic from SpikenzieLabs
For the occasion, we laser cut a special raster RoboBrrd:
As well as some CTV RoboBrrd tokens:
The rastering effect was quite interesting. In the Illustrator file, the colours of the shapes were the same as the CTV Logo, but it looks like the laser cutter took the brightness of each colour and based off of that either rastered more or less. This would be interesting to play around with if I ever got my own laser cutter 
I’m totally psyched to start getting the pieces that make up a RoboBrrd! I spent a lot of time organizing what parts I needed to buy and from where. Here are some of the McMaster-Carr parts!
Wow, they are very instructive with their packaging:
Here’s one of my favourite parts! Rivets for the wings! Windell showed me these when I was an Artist in Residence at Evil Mad Science (which was totally AWESOME)! The rivets are sweet and they do the trick great!
And also rivets that fit the beak now too, so you don’t have to snap off the wing rivets! Woohoo!
These are the screws that go through the pcb and into some mounting posts. They’re 6-32 sized. I don’t really know much about screw sizes, so I ended up choosing that size and it’s ok.
The piano wire for the wings… cool!
So when I got back to the lab afterwards, I wanted to test out everything. This happened:
Turns out the screws that I ordered to go through the material and into the other side of the mounting post were too short.
Blah. This was my error! Fail! I need them to be 1/4″ instead of 3/16″. I have 4 of these boxes that are useless now…
As far as mounting goes, this is how tall it is:
There is a lot of room to access the plugs on the board, and even run wires out the back if you want!
These RGB piranha LEDs are nice and bright, and great for the googely eyes on RoboBrrds. When you attach the eye with hotglue to the LED, the little nub dents in a little, then the square around it supports the eye some more. In comparison to the 5mm LEDs, these result in less accidental pop-offs of the eyes.
Here was one of the fancier RoboBrrd designs. I added in some slots on the top face to put in some spikey mohawk pieces.
A spikey front face as well… Going to paint it all up and it can take over SpikenzieLabs and annoy everyone
Apart from this, I’ve been getting some surprises from the amount of fees that there is. I remember there was one transaction that had so many extras on it, like federal tax, provincial tax, USD to CAD in Paypal (and if you do this in Paypal, it is NOT at par! arrg!), and then another transaction fee.
Oh yeah, and I based all of the components off of digikey.COM rather than .CA … so now I have to spend 4 hours on the spreadsheets again and redo it all for Canadian pricing.
The less “rookie mistake” variables that get messed up, the more could go towards a laser cutter.
It’s really frustrating to know that every single mistake within production that you make will have a future impact on whatever you do next. The repercussions of the mistakes no longer involve a ‘learning experience’ and ‘future improvement’, because now all the mistakes have to do with money and time. So if you make a mistake, there’s absolutely nothing positive about it.
(Note: this is different for mistakes in research & general goofing hacking)
More of the components will probably be arriving soon, it’s going to be a lot of fun to try them out! I will keep everyone posted on the latest updates and everything!
Thanks again to SpikenzieLabs for taking the extra time for the CTV interview and for the space to set it all up!
And yeah, from all of the ‘kit businesses’ places that I’ve seen, behind the divider theirs is the messiest. 
(I didn’t even see that they had a drill press until Tuesday!) Not that messy is a bad thing though.
More updates to come, thanks everyone for helping to spread the word for RoboBrrd on Indiegogo!
Really hope that we can meet the next funding goal!
