matsu » robots http://mat.su matsu (n): japanese for pine tree Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:36:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Codebits 2009 http://mat.su/codebits-2009/ http://mat.su/codebits-2009/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:25:29 +0000 Pedro Pinheiro http://mat.su/?p=643 For those of you who don’t know what Codebits is, it’s a three day international event of programming and hacking held every year by Sapo, with talks, workshops, quiz competitions, a 24 hour team coding contest, and a live music show (this year by pornophonique). It’s free, and it hosts, feeds, and powers (two full time generators for all those multi-core laptops) around 600 participants for three days of fun, work, meeting people, and lots, lots, lots of pizza.

Although I’m not a real programmer, I submitted a LEGO Mindstorms NXT project, and we ended up being the biggest team, with nine members!! Here’s the video:

And besides the project, I had two very unique experiences: first, meeting Mitch Altman and buying a TV-B-Gone kit and assembling it right there and then with his help, and the second, meeting the people from AltLab, Tiago who I had met before at Twittlis, and Catarina, who were demoing their Makerbot Industries open source 3D printer.

Putting 2 + 2 together, I managed to challenge Catarina to design and print an enclosure for my assembled TV-B-Gone, right there at Codebits!

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

If you have your own 3D printer, you can download the model files here, and print your own TV-B-Gone enclosure!

Kids, *this* is the future, and you probably saw it here first! :-)

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