White House? Yes! Robogames? Yes!! Crazy non-stop roller-coaster of life? Definitely.

UPDATE: Sylvia announces the Science Fair for the White House! And be sure to watch the live event at wh.gov/sciencefair, or at wh.gov/live, beginning at 11:30am EDT (8:30am PDT) on Monday, April 22, 2013.

Original Post:
Brentwood School STEAM Day was a blast, we saw the sights, and helped over 40 kids walk away with a brand new mintyboost, and a respect for making things with their soldering irons. Both worksheets used at the event are now available in the printables section. Wrap-up post to come.

Not long after, Sylvia was invited to a hangout to talk about the Maker movement with Tom Kalil at the White House, bringing together a bunch of other really awesome maker peeps to talk about how we can make things better in education with making things. We even managed to get the WaterColorBot to have its own video feed while it drew the White House Logo!

Then only about 3 weeks later, we got one more call from the White House: an invite to their 3rd ever Science Fair, and to bring a project of Sylvia's choice!! Though the date was only a week away. What could she possibly bring? The WaterColorBot! With a few hardware tweaks, and some software help (from Dad, and from Robotgrll for the iPad app), she thinks she's ready.

Then there was the problem of how to fund such a crazy trip with less than 4 days to do it. We asked Evil Mad Scientist Labs and they graciosly promised to match all donations up to $1,242! We then managed to pull together a funding campaign with GoFundMe in about 4 hours, and once it was launched, made our funding goal in less than 23 hours thanks to the incredibly awesome people on twitter and facebook!

You guys rock!!!

You can still donate to Sylvia and the cause here, and extra funds go towards making awesome shows, and getting young girls into tech.

So now we've made our goal, bought our tickets, and now we're ready to go.

If you're in the San Francisco area, come see Sylvia and her White House bound Watercolor painting robot at Robogames! We'll be there all day Friday and Saturday, then fly out Sunday at 3pm and head out to the White House Science Fair. No you can't join us there, but you will be able to see it broadcast live online at whitehouse.gov/live on Monday, exact time TBA.

See you out there!

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!!!!!