You Design It

I have two little interrelated quirks when it comes to projects, the first being that I need to be challenged, the second that I work best when taking on multiple projects simultaneously. The less challenged I am, the more projects I attempt to undertake (it keeps the voices in my head busy). This is no different when it comes to robotics, which has had the side effect of keeping me from building new robots. I have even managed to come up with several very challenging robotic ideas, but lack a real incentive to undertake the task.

This is one of the reasons that for the last few years I have been inventing and theorizing rather than building. It has definite bonuses in keeping my mind busy and presenting ongoing projects, but until each new invention comes to fruition or each theory produces something I am in need of, I will be slow in designing and building new robots. And I miss that.

To fix this I came up with a novel idea and presented it to the forum members over at the Society of Robots, you can view the post here. Basically the idea is to use this blog to continue to motivate me to build a specific robot; self motivation is after all one of the founding reasons for this blog. The idea is for you, my four readers, to create the overall design of the robot I am to build. It works like this:

Step 1. I present a design topic on said robot, listing the available options as I see them. An example being method of vision choices: (a) Black and White (b) Color
Step 2. For three days I will accept additional suggestions (via comments) related to the specific design topic, for instance if the topic is method of vision as listed above, you might suggest I include Infrared or Ultraviolet as choices.
Step 3. The design topic is presented as a poll or survey with the options I have come up with or you have suggested (within reason, asking for x-ray vision would be out of my price range EVER and thus not included as an option choice). The poll will stay open for a week or so to allow everyone to vote on the chosen design principle.
Step 4. Where applicable I will post an entry on the design choice decided upon including my theories on the topic, maybe some history, possible implementation methods, etc.
Step 5. If further options are available on a given design technology we will return back to Step 1, otherwise I will get to work building the given robot part and document it along the way. Once I have completed the piece, I will create an entry detailing what I did and how I did it, so you can follow along.
Step 6. We move on to the next part by going back to Step 1.

When all is said and done, we should have a working robot that you helped design, and more importantly, helped motivate me to build. The completed project will then get wrapped up and edited into a nice tutorial that I will post someplace here, as well as submitting it back over to the Society of Robots website. Obviously, there will be some design decisions along the way that I will just make, but for the most part it will all be up to my loyal readers, you, to design it.