I built my first robot yesterday.  It took 3 hours, caused my RSI to flare up again and made my boyfriend think I was mad as I talked to myself and swore at the soldering iron throughout the whole experience.  But at the end of it I had built a light following, obstacle negotiating, mouse shaped wheeled robot.  I think it is very cool.

Before yesterday I had never held a soldering iron before.  The nearest thing I had ever come to any kind of engineering was putting together flat pack furniture, very very badly.  I have never had to learn any of these things because I am a girl and all I have had to do is bat my eyelids at the nearest available male and he has fallen over himself to demonstrate his manliness by doing all my DIY for me.  I know that’s not very p.c. but it is the truth none the less.  And yet there I was yesterday, needlenose pliers in one hand, 4.7k resistor in the other, handbuilding a robot.  And it was the most fun I’ve had in years.

First off, I am a geek.  I am a computer programmer and have written all sorts of software from trading platforms to mobile phone websites.  Robotics and AI have always fascinated me, but I have never done anything about it.  I learnt AI as part of my degree and so ANNs and GAs are not alien to me, but in my whole life I have never done more than try and solve simple toy problems with it.  I have avoided hardware like the plague.  It’s been frightening to me, largly due to my inexperience with anything practical.  And the people I have known who have been into this stuff have been rather intimidating.  If you did not know what a transistor did you were dismissed immediately.  It made it a very uninviting world to try and get involved with.  So I forgot about it and got on with my life.

Until about 4 months ago, when out of the blue my interest was reawakened.  This was largely thanks to my boyfriend, an AI programmer himself, who when I told him about my secret, long forgotten interest in robotics encouraged my to persue it.  So now I want to create and program robots that do cool and funky things.

But I needed somewhere to start, and sadly that required money to buys parts.  For the 2 months I have been trying to sell my car so that I have the money to buy bits.

Sadly, this has rather fallen flat on its face, cos who wants to buy a sports car when petrol costs a fortune and there’s a credit crunch on?  So I’ve been slowly getting frustrated waiting and boring all my workmates to death with my robotic plans.

But Friday was my birthday and my boyfriend got the hint and gave me a robot kit, Herbie the Mousebot from Solarbotics and so at last I am able to realise my dream.  This is going to be fun!