It’s  been a while since I blogged, I know.  But this time I have a good excuse.  Seriously.  It’s a very, very good excuse.  You see, I’ve started a Social Network and Community for Robotics - Brighton Robotics - and it’s somewhat swallowed all my spare time.

I did this for 2 reasons.

1. I wanted to learn more about robotics and wanted the opportunity to learn from more experienced builders that myself.  I looked around and tried to find a local group of roboticists that I could join, something like NYC Resistor perhaps.  There was nothing.  Not a single group. Not even at the university.  I complained to Ian about this.  He said ‘Start one then’.
2. In December last year (2008), I gave a talk about beginning robotics at the Brighton Girl Geek Dinner and a demo of my sumobots at the £5 App Xmas Special.  After both of these events, I had several people approach me and tell me that they had always wanted to build robots but didn’t know where to start.  They said that I had inspired them to get going with it.  I took heart in this and asked them if they would benefit from a local group that they could join to get advice and ideas from.  They all said yes.  I was also approached by a couple people who stated that they also built robots and who wanted to chat about it with someone else who shared their passion.  They also expressed interest in a group.  So I started one

We had our first meeting on 22nd January which was just a social.  I used ning to quickly set up a site for the group and advertised the event by emailing some of the people who had given me their details after the events in December, posting the event on the site and on upcoming and twittering about it incessantly.  Ian also sent an email to Informatics department at Sussex University.

As a complete shock, we had 22 people show up.  I had no idea there were 22 people in Brighton who were interested in robotics, but there they were.  We had some students studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAI) Bsc or Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems (EASy) Msc as Sussex Uni, some research fellows from the CCNR labs also at Sussex, some complete newbies, some like myself who had build a few bots but wanted to move onto the next stage, some lapsed old hands who wanted to get back into it and a fair few experienced roboticists who were super excited about getting to spend time with other roboticists.  Some of us brought some of our robots along and we sent them running around the room and getting under everyone’s feet.  All in all it was an incredibly successful event.  Some more detailed write up’s can be found on the Robot Brighton site and on the blog of Tristan, one of the attendees.

Since then, I’ve been organising the second event, a hack night were everyone can get together and build robots.  Steve, one of our most active members, is doing tutorial for some of the beginners to build an arduino powered wheeled robot, but others are just coming along to hack some hardware or program some chips in the company of other enthusiasts.  The night will be held on Thursday 26th March at The Skiff.  For more information see the event details on the Brighton Robotics site.

The third meetup is already arranged too.  On 23rd April, Graham Wiseman from the Shadow Robot Company will be coming to Brighton to give a talk about their robot arms and hands and, hopefully, to give us a demo.

I have also set up a twitter account for the group where I am posting robotics news and keeping people up to date with the things the group is doing.  Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/robotbrighton.