A few weeks ago Jenn sent me a video of a robot that a Danish guy named Frits had built out of paint mixing sticks and hot glue. He called it "Yellow Drum Machine", and it basically just drives around until it finds something interesting, and then it plays a drum beat on it, records the beat with a microphone, then plays that back on its giant smokestack-like speaker and taps out other beats along with it, or dances to the music. It was adorable, and I wanted one of my own. As I looked at the pictures more closely, I realized that I actually already had a lot of the motors and sensors that he used to build his, and so it was decided — I have to build one of my own.

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I've always been really interested in robotics and artificial intelligence, but because I changed majors in Freshman year from computer engineering to computer science, I missed out on the chance to get any real formal education in the field. I did take one electrical engineering class where we learned to breadboard circuits and stuff, and it was actually one of my favorite classes at Clemson. But it was only an introduction to the subject and didn't really get into detail, and so despite my longstanding interest in the field, I've never really known how to go about making the jump and actually start doing it.

I have a Lego Mindstorms kit that I've toyed with, but the inherent fragility of Legos was always a limitation. I found that if I tried to fashon an arm to pick stuff up with, I couldn't apply too much force or it'd just smash itself to pieces spectacularly. So the desire to learn to build "real" robots out of metal has stuck with me.

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