Spoonbot Is Go!
Tl;dr: We’ve made a cool thing you can buy here and if you want to see and hear us talking about it, you can watch the monthly OSHWA round-up we were on, here. Should you wish to make your own, you can find everything you need right here.
Right, with that out of the way, let’s have the longer story. Don’t worry, you will not be quizzed later.
As soon as we found out about full colour soldermasks offered by JLC, we knew we had to put some robots on boards. We started with Blinkiebot, and then we had the idea to build a little robot to indicate spoons levels. Chris started doing the hard work, I started drawing a robot, and before we knew it we had some test boards (a lot of test boards) winging their way over to us from the JLC factories.
We had some fun with the reflow oven (and we melted a couple of potentiometers), and Spoonbot was born:
(Image ID: Three circuit board badges with robots on them, lying on a wood effect background. Each of the robots has a battery, with 5 LEDs on their belly, which are lit to various degrees. The robot looks puzzled about it. End ID.)
Next, we wanted to make sure we made the design available for other people. Open source as a concept is important to us for various reasons, and we try hard to make our work accessible to all. If you want to make your own take on Spoonbot, you’ll find everything you need here.
We ordered more boards - these fully assembled aside from the pin back (which is not an electronic component and therefore not in the catalog), Chris rewrote the code, and we were ready to launch it on our Tindie. It all coincided really wonderfully with OSHWA’s monthly roundup which we were very honoured to attend alongside MCQN’s Adrian McEwen presenting My Bike’s Got LED and Makers Making Change’s Brad Wellington presenting the more accessible Willow Joystick.
Spoonbot’s pin badge version is now available for sale on Tindie for anyone who wants one :) If you make your own, we’d love to see it! If you have any questions about Spoonbot or other endeavours, give us a shout anytime!