Bring on the Robots at USASEF Friday Sneak Peak
SparkFun Electronics is headed to the United States of America's Science and Engineering Festival. For the Friday Sneak Peak on the 25th of April we'll be hosting a Robotics Social Time in conference room 150B and we want you to bring your robots to visit!
SparkFun Education will be at the United States of America Science and Engineering Festival for a total of four days of soldering, programming, video games, programmable hats, robots and e-textiles.
We've instilled wonder in a large portion of the next generation.
Friday, April 25th is Sneak Peak Friday when people are allowed to check out the exhibit floor before everything goes crazy with Science! SparkFun won't be on the exhibitor floor Friday, we'll be in conference room 150B in the Walter E. Washington Conference Center. While you do need tickets to go to Sneak Peak Friday, our event is free! Our robots would like to meet your robots. (Provided they are not mean robots, of course) You may encounter some weird looks on your way to our event, but once you're in room 150B no one will bat an eye, IR emitter/detector pair or other sensory circuit/organ. The only stipulation is that we ask that all robots be terrestrial robots. So no aerial robots and no marine robots. (I thought about tell you that if you bring the water you can bring marine robots as a joke. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), some of you would show up with tanks of water, because that's the type of customers we have. (And, yes, I just used nested parenthesis in a blog post, twice.) ) I doesn't matter if your robot is smart or not, we're equal opportunity robot enthusiasts. So bring on the friendly earthbound bots- ambulatory, wheeled or otherwise!
Some of would probably try to bring this whole setup to the conference center, please don't.
Here's a quick run down of the other events that SparkFun will be conducting while we're in the area:
We do workshops. Sometimes we do really big workshops.
Thursday the 24th you'll find us conducting two different workshops in room 140B. The first one, from nine to five will be using Ardublock to program a LilyPad ProtoSnap Development board. The second workshop will be our good old fashioned Intro to Arduino class. We've been doing that one since 2010, so, although this one will be an incredibly shortened version, you'll wind up putting together three different circuits and learning a little programming. There are still a couple of seats left in the first class, so please, feel free to sign up!
You can use the LilyPad line to make some really sweet costumes.
Friday the 25th is Robotics Social Time! Like I said, bring your robots, check out our robots, play some video games, light up some LEDs and maybe jump on our trampoline! Ten80 Education will be there with us, we'll also have some Cubelets and an area where you can check out some of our Open educational materials. And please! Don't limit the idea of robot to something with wheels or legs, either. We'd love to see your e-textile costume, video game controller or robotically enabled George Foreman. (Extra points if one of you actually made the breakfast making robot that I'm always talking about in my workshops.)
Sometimes robots look, well, not exactly like robots.
On Saturday and Sunday we'll be teaching soldering. We're good at that. Seriously. Last time at USASEF we taught somewhere around 750 how to solder in two days. This time we're stepping up our game and teaching workshops on programming and e-textiles as well! Thanks to our Robotfest friends we've got enough space to do it all and we're bringing a crew that is twice as large this year.
Unfortunately, these guys couldn't make the event.
Some come by! Bring your robots, costumes, video games and anything else you might feel comfortable walking with around the Walter E. Washington Center.
