Buddy 4000 is a classy robot chassis designed to express robot emotions with an artistic flair. 
See it in action in this video!
Buddy 4000 is available NOW in the RoboBrrd Store! Special introductory sale, $5 off!
It is everything you are looking for in a robot chassis that looks like a classic robot. Perfect as a chassis for a small project, or just a robotic statue.
Documentation
There is documentation available for building the robot, example electronics, and programming. Check out the main page for Buddy 4000 to see them all.
Open Source Hardware
Yes, Buddy 4000 is OSHW! You can view the .stl’s in our 3D viewer mode, and download an archive of all the files. Hopefully this will let everyone be able to make their own Buddy 4000 (or even a derivative of it). Send pics if you do! Go check it out.
Name Your Price
There is a special ‘name your price’ feature on the Buddy 4000 store page. The extra money is going towards our robotics fund / Maker Faire NY travel fund! We really appreciate your help, and hope to see you at Maker Faire NY!
Inspiration
Buddy 4000 was created to look like a modern version of the old ‘tin toy’ robots. We put much effort into the design of the ‘bot, so hopefully it meets this goal. It took a while to finish this off, especially with all the documentation. Enjoy it! If it makes someone smile, it has been worth it.
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Thanks to all the twitter people for following this project over the course of developing it. It’s been fun, and the replies were always interesting to read!
Let your RoboBrrd celebrate April showers in style with the Bubble Front Face!
There is a new front face for your RoboBrrd in the store!
This is a 3D printed artistic front face that you can add on to your RoboBrrd. It fits with both the laser cut and 3DP versions of RoboBrrd. Simply replace the existing front face with this one, and let the other RoboBrrds be astonished with the beauty of it!
This front face was fun to design and printed out very nicely. The other RoboBrrds think it is cool too!
We have finished printing a RoboBrrd in purple ABS! Between all of our other experimental prints, it took a while, but the result is pretty nice.
Here are some of the nice details that you can see:
If you want to make your own RoboBrrd on your 3D printer, check out the RoboBrrd 3D OSHW page!
Introducing the new RoboBrrd 3D printed pieces!
These are all the 3D printing files for creating your own RoboBrrd! You can download the .stl files and get printing right away and also view the dimensional drawings. Check out the webpage!
The dream of having RoboBrrd as a widespread toy all around the world is what is really motivating us. OSHW combined with availability of 3D printers, it can be possible!
One day, there will be more RoboBrrds in the world than Furbys, and everyone will make it themselves.
It seems odd that we go to a store to purchase a toy when we can create one ourselves. So let’s do it, and make a positive impact! Manufacture our own toys, customize them, learn about them, build them into robots, make them better.
We put a lot of effort into the webpage by making the pics look fun & groovy. With the 3D Viewer Mode, it’s great to be able to spin, zoom, rotate 3D files. Many people dismiss RoboBrrd as goofy/stupid/useless, so it is also nice to show the thought that went in to RoboBrrd.
On the technical side, creating the pieces to work with both the laser cut pieces and 3d pieces was interesting. The two variables were the extrusion width, and the kerf. Figuring out the extrusion width was straight forward- we measured the mdf with calipers, and they said 3.05mm. As for the kerf, it was exactly +0.2mm different than the laser cut ones. Funnily enough, the laser cut kerf adjustment was -0.1mm, which meant all that needed to be changed was the – sign to a + sign.
There is a donation button on the webpage, which will help us to create even more robots. Each donation will come with a ‘RoboBrrd Name Card’ that you can fill out and give to your newly created RoboBrrd. If you do donate, thanks a bunch! 
Well, what are you waiting for? LET’S GO PRINT A ROBOBRRD!
This post was originally from robotgrrl.com
The RoboBrrd Chassis is a great way to get started on your own RoboBrrd build. You can place an Arduino (or microcontroller of your choice) inside, and customize it to your hearts content. Read more in the shop!
There are also Token packs available, rumour has it that they bring magical powers and good luck to your RoboBrrds!
Meet Stella, the RoboBrrd from @sailindaze! He started out with the base chassis version:
This was RoboBrrd making its first movements!
But the fun didn’t stop there… he added on the eyes from an Elmo onto the RoboBrrd.
It looks so funny! Totally great for making a caption contest, right? This image is pretty funny too, it looks like RoboBrrd just escaped from many wild robot rovers:
Of course, the eyes light up too:
It’s going to be great to see where Stella will go next! Thanks for sharing @salindaze! Be sure to follow his progress over on Google+ and Twitter too.
The week before this one was pretty crazy in RoboBrrd land. We sent out many more of the RoboBrrd kits, and working our way through the list!
We only have two arms and RoboBrrd isn’t very useful at typing with its beak, so here are the updates from last week and the week before!
Here is the video for the piano wire bending:
As you can tell, lots of these suggestions for improvements were from various forum members who have been posting about questions they have! The feedback is extremely useful to make RoboBrrd a more clear and straight-forward build. If you have any feedback, please let us know on the forum!
Yikes! I was not receiving notifications of replies to a topic, so apologies for the delay in replies. It seems to be sorted out now.
Additionally, if you have signed up to the forum and are still waiting for an email confirmation- let me know. The email part might be borked, but I can approve you manually.
We have lots of people posting their questions! If you don’t understand something with RoboBrrd, don’t be shy and please ask away! 
The list is getting shorter, and some people will be getting their RoboBrrds soon!
LOTS of people have been posting their pics of RoboBrrd! THANKS! We have seen a lot of them on Google+, we reshare them so you can see them all! It was fun to see two of them on the Robot Party last week as well! Keep them coming to us, and we’ll be curating all of these pics pretty soon
Also, @eightlines (who made RoboBrrd listen to voice commands) now has the code as a gist, so it is easier to fork!
That’s all for this week. Have a good time building robots everyone! Hope to see you and your robots at the Robot Party!
Here is a really chirpy cool hack from @eightlines, a RoboBrrd that responds to voice commands! In the video, you can see that as he says different colours, then the RoboBrrd will change the colours of its eyes.
It works by connecting the RoboBrrd to Processing. In Processing, it uses Florian Schultz’ Speech to Text Library (STT).
Check out the video of it in action below!
RoboBrrd Voice Commands from Eightlines on Vimeo.
You can find the example code here.
Thanks for posting about this hack eightlines, and as he mentions: “you can add on to the script to make it do more”!
This is a really neat way to interact with RoboBrrd! Let us know if you also try out some voice commands too.
I wonder what happens when you say “Make Gazpacho”…
Read more about it on eightline’s blog!
Welcome to our weekly newsie blog post! It will be posted every Sunday, assuming that the RoboBrrds are working diligently. Here we will discuss what is up and happening in the land (and forest) of RoboBrrd.
Press read more to view the rest of the newsie!
If you didn’t catch the little snippet of RoboBrrd on TV because of the rush of the holidays, no worries- here is the recording! RoboBrrd starts at the 0:58 mark.
Mega thanks to Christine Long (@CTVChristine) for the interview snippet, and SpikenzieLabs (@SpikenzieLabs) for letting us set up there and use their laser cutter
It’s great to see DIY robots on TV and spreading the word to even more people. Perhaps people who never thought about building robots will now be inspired to do so now!
RoboBrrd loves chirping on TV
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