Interlock brought five demonstrations to our table at the Rochester Museum & Science Center Friday, July 19, 2013.
This was noon to 4 for the Make It! installment of their summer Family Fridays series.
From left to right, we see the MacGyverbot Printrbot LC generously lent for this demonstration but often seen in operation at Interlock, the Interlock Huxley RepRapPro 3D printer, a blue and white lunch-sized slow cooker keeping some Polycaprolactone (PCL) hand-moldable and 3D-printable thermoplastic (previously) warm and ready to try for free-form molding, the shoebox regatta demonstration (with special guest Mr. Jaws!), and at the far edge, a solderless breadboard with a temperature comparator demonstration featuring two LM35 temperature sensors picked up recently from College Home Hardware in Toronto.
[caption id="attachment_1480" align="alignnone"
width="512"]
Interlock table at RMSC Family
Friday[/caption]
We shared that portion of the first floor with some folks from Greater Rochester Robotics, who brought the robot from their most recent FIRST Robotics Competition season, Ultimate Ascent. They were letting visitors move the robot around the floor and occasionally launch a plastic flying disk or two.
It wasn't quite the battle of the bots, but a couple of times the 'bot got up a good head start and whacked into the front of our table, sloshing around the water in the PCL crock and the regatta box. Midway through, such a collision might have had a role to play in loosening up the Huxley's X-axis drive gear (now since fixed), at which point we switched from printing in silver-gray PLA (polylactic acid) on the Huxley to printing in fluorescent yellow ABS (acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene) on the MacGyverbot. This led us to discover that kids love them some bright plastic sharks.
[caption id="attachment_1481" align="alignnone" width="512"]
Greater Rochester Robotic's 2013 FIRST robot wheels
around the first floor of the Rochester Museum & Science
Center.[/caption]