A pardon we beg from all of our bot-tastic readers and Twitter-followers for such a prolonged absence! Our two week adventure turned into four times that, packed full of traveling, family and investigations into prospective opportunities for future Bots 4 Tots development. To be certain, though, our minds were never far from the world of robotics!

One of our adventures took Don and I to Science World at TELUS World of Science in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, we were delighted by the robotic band in the Our World exhibit; we brought it to life for our enjoyment purely by alternate energy sources FTW! Also, we visited Science World’s Omnimax Theatre where we viewed the very well-executed and touching film, Roving Mars. Robots in space get me every time.

But wait, there’s more! Our good friends at Luscious Layers, who have kindly provided cupcakes for our participating Bots 4 Tots youngsters in the past, have asked for our help in roboticizing (I just made that word up. Take that Merriam-Webster.) cakes. Yes, you read correctly. Robot cakes. Boosh. We started where most burgeoning hobby electronics projects start: we lit an LED. In our first cooperative project, we effected a very impressive cake that included lit LEDs as part of the sky-motif decoration. It is a rather extraordinary design because all you need to do is insert the LEDs into the cake and they will light up, and furthermore you can cut a slice including an LED out of it and the slice will come out cleanly and the LED will turn off as the slice separates from the rest of the cake. Can you guess how we did it? Hint: we did not electrify the cake.

And then there was Halloween, quite possibly our favorite day of the year. It turns out that this is also true for our friends at Luscious Layers; they decided that this “All Hallows Even” was the perfect opportunity to take our epicurean madness to the next level. Behold: the Arduino-animated, palatable-yet-programmable, raucously-raspberry-filled-red-velvet Zombie Cake from Beyond the Grrrraaavvve! Where will we go from here? Only time will tell.

Last but not least, we have also been spending a good deal of these past two months discussing the future of Bots 4 Tots. Don and I have decided to make some exciting site and program changes, which I will post more on in the very near future! We are also in the midst of planning our upcoming Winter 2009 auction (featuring the always awesome Bunk Bots), the specifics of our planned Winter 2009/2010 workshop sessions, and lots of other good stuff to ensure that kids will be building robots well into the new year. Thanks to all of you who have helped and are helping to make Bots 4 Tots a successful program!

It’s true. We blew up our hosting service. Not with bombs, but with awesome.

You guys have spiked our bandwidth and ramped up our use so much that we’ve had to upgrade THREE TIMES in the last 2 weeks! I’m not telling you to stop; tell your friends and family and friends’ families and friends’ families’ dogs about us, because if getting you guys pumped about teaching robotics to kids is wrong, then baby I don’t want to be right.

Let’s go for a fourth burn. Our hosting service can handle it. Let’s tear this place down. Get the whole world to visit. If a small faction donate, we’ll be up to our ears in robot workshops!

Hit us with your best shot. Fire away!

Just for the heck of it, Bots 4 Tots decided to start a Twitter account. Why not? Turns out, this was a great idea! Now we can follow the haps of our robotics community as well as our favorite blogs, and you can follow us! But, wait. What if a real robot were to tweet? Hey, that’s a great idea!

Don and I are working on a Bots 4 Tots mascot, a soon-to-be-revealed robot that is as old school as those Adidas shell-toes you’ve got in the back of your closet.  But don’t let his appearance fool you; our mascot will be hip to the times. It’s ability to tweet autonomously will only be one of its many talents.  We can’t wait to introduce him to you!

Just now it is sort of Beta. We’re going to make a little graphic for the logo to say as much. This is so that you can help us test out the system while we get it going. That’s pretty cool, huh?

We made a few site changes today, and would like to let you know about them. We’ll try to keep a running tally of this sort of thing for you all to check out and keep up with.

Updates:

• We reformatted the text on the home page. It is pretty intimidating writing a bunch of stuff for the whole world to see. We’ll continue to update this, to be sure.
• We worked on a bit of the content for the What is B4T? page and linked up a few items not previously linked. We didn’t link the What is B4T? page, though. That would be too obvious.
• We started setting up our donation system. Soon you’ll be able to help us spread tha wonders of robotics to children all over!

We’ll keep you posted as we progress. Have a great time!