While we were at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012, out of nowhere, Robotgrrl came up to us and asked if I wanted her one and only, WaterBrrd! Of course I said yes!

I bet you're wondering what this RoboBrrd stuff is all about....

RoboBrrd started out as an interactive robot made of felt, popsicle sticks and an Arduino. Now, Robotgrrl is making it into an easy to solder board and lasercut kit for making your very own open source RoboBrrd!

The kit isn’t quite done yet (it’s hard to put together a kit!), so I just got the wood parts that she made using the laser at Evil Mad Science Laboratories!! Muahahaha!

To make the wings flap, we used paper clips as armatures connected to little blue servos mounted in the rectangle holes behind the eyes.

For the beak, it was a lot trickier! With the top and bottom beak parts loose, I figured out that with some cardboard and a paperclip triangle, you could keep it steady and open and close it. The servo at the back just pushes and pulls the cardboard.

When its fully completed, I want to make my WaterBrrd say my tweets by chirping and flapping its wings twice, or have it tell me the weather and current temperature. The possibilities are endless!

For right now, its flapping its wings, beaking around, blinking its eyes, and talking with an old android phone my dad hooked up. The programming was all done by me.

I used an Arduino Uno and programmed it very easily. It is just like scratch, except with words and semicolons. The robobrrd will be a great kit and I can’t wait till it comes out! GO ROBOBRRD!!!!!

That's right, "Super-Awesome" Sylvia is in MAKE: Issue 30! Head over to the MakerShed (or your favorite newsstand) and pick up as many as they'll let you buy at once!!

Not only does it have Sylvia waxing nostalgic of her favorite moments at Maker Faire, but it's chock full of amazing and unique projects that you could get out there and make.

Though it's been quite a while since our last blog post (and video) we're glad to say everything is just fine, and that's one of the reasons we're so slow to catch up. First, announcing two brand new site features: Printables, a place we'll be storing everything we make that's worth of sharing and duplicating at home, and Press, where we'll be posting quotes and links to articles/reblogs about the show, and it's also a good starting place for people who might want to know more about the show but don't know where to start. Also we've switched the comments over to Disqus, seeing as the spam problem was just not going away.

Also, since the last blog post we've been to the amazing Exploratorium Open MAKE:, The Parallax Expo, and Sunday 4/22/2012 we'll be heading off to Robogames! (thanks to goading from RobotGrrl)

We'll have photos, video and blog posts for most of these events coming in the next few weeks so stay tuned!