Field Robot Chronicles

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Ahoy Adventurebots! It’s a slow but steady change of seasons. Here's a glimpse into what has been unfolding over the past few weeks.

This newsletter is a little shorter than previous editions. As an Easter egg hunt bonus: can you spot how many times the phrase "behind the scenes" is mentioned? 😃

Robots in Nature: Signs of Spring

Robot Butterfly with yellow wings in the foreground. It's a beautiful fresh and bright spring day, with light streaks and shadows cast over the short and slightly green grass. In the background is an Inunnguaq sculpture, and at the feet are yellow sprouts

Starting to see some plants sprouting! Featuring a lovely Inunnguaq sculpture

Robot Butterfly with yellow wings on the shores of Lake Ontario, with fog blurring the trees in the background

A rare occurrence - the fog rolled in, midday! On the shores of Lake Ontario Park

Check out our @RobotInThePark Instagram in the meantime for more photos

Store

Huzzah! Noble subscribers of the Field Robot Chronicles! You are the very first to hear these grand tidings:

🎉 The Robot Missions Store is now launched! 🎉

Screenshot of three products in the Robot Missions Store

You all have first dibs of this batch of Robot Butterfly Kits for a few days, packed and ready to go! Check it out here and all the wing colours!

Should you come across any speck of dust or curious glitch while perusing the store, let me know, as work continues behind the scenes on it.

Tett Centre Artist in Residence

The artist residency at the Tett Centre has commenced! Here’s a post on social media announcing it.

Check out this video to see the studio space and a peek of the surroundings.

In the studio, a Robot Butterfly flutters gently in the window, running a quiet loop for all passersby to behold, as Bowie the robot lurks while anticipating its repairs. 😃

Robot in the Park icon, a lil green tree robot

An initial fun task was to set up my AxiDraw pen plotter. This will enable drawing generative art work onto paper, combining various properties of the pens to create different effects. There’s more behind the scenes work remaining, such as adding a Raspberry Pi to operate it standalone. Plus, more experimentation, possibly with different mediums and tools.

One of the side quests has been finding additional tablespace to make tasks easier, such as repairing Bowie. Good news comes our way: an artist organisation will hopefully be able to lend a table on 5 May. Fingers crossed!

It has been joyful to connect with the other artists when they are present. There’s a spark of collaboration in the air! It will be exciting to see where it might lead.

Robot in the Park Update

Stay tuned for more news about upcoming Robot in the Park events! There’s plenty of behind the scenes work underway to get everything rolling.

Manufacturing

Now here’s some behind the scenes work that took place and looks visually cool. Robot Butterfly has three circuit boards. Chonky is the board that makers solder themselves. Keystone and Boostlet! are assembled in-house by hand.

Collage of images showing the small batch assembly in action on Boostlet (yellow circuit board) and Keystone (blue circuit board)

Small batch assembly in action. Left: Boostlet! on the small hotplate reflow. Upper right: Placing a resistor onto Keystone. Lower right: Keystone on the hotplate for reflow.

To manufacture these in-house by hand, several steps are required. First, solder paste is carefully applied using a stencil. Then, each surface-mount component is placed onto their footprint. A small hotplate reflows the paste, soldering the components into place.

Then the through hole components are soldered, such as the headers and USB-C connector. The final steps involve optical inspection, testing, debugging, and fixing. The USB-C connectors are tricky and often require rework.

Mylar ESD bags with the assembled and validated Boostlet! circuit boards inside

Boostlet! circuit boards validated and now in the ESD bags, ready to go

Once assembly is victorious, each board is placed into an ESD bag and added to the Robot Butterfly kits!

Onwards

Time to get out there and explore nature! Thanks for being part of the adventure. More field notes and curious robot creatures will be coming your way soon!

The next scheduled dispatch is on 31 May, but with a little luck, we’ll hopefully pop in before then with the first Robot in the Park event! (Fingers crossed)

Until next time,

- Erin RobotZwrrl

Hiya Erin Kennedy! You are receiving this because *unrolls a long papyrus scroll and checks notes*

Erin’s talk at TEDxOttawa (virtual) - 2020

This newsletter dispatches approximately once per month — unless one of our robots does something particularly epic — and includes highlights from our community events (Robot In The Park) and behind the scenes updates on our robot development (Robot Missions).

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