I popped along to Dorkbot Cardiff last week. For those who don’t know, Dorkbot is all about people doing cool and creative things with electricity.

The image above is a portrait of your truly that was drawn by a robot/machine called Sketchy. A photograph was taken on a smartphone which was then converted to a vector image and transmitted via bluetooth to the machine by a little app that had been written for the handset.

The video below, shot by MCJammyCustard, shows the machine in action as it recieves the information and sets about drawing a portait.

In addition to Sketchy, there was also demonstrations from Paul Granjon, who was showing off his new 3D printer and robots that he controls with brainwaves, and two sculpture students from Cardiff School of Art and Design shared their work with arduinos, lights and gyroscopes, which although in it’s infancy, was fascinating.

Aside from simple geeky curiosity, one of the reasons I attended Dorkbot was to try and get some idea of how easy/difficult it is to have a tinker with electricity. As any one who has followed this blog for a while will now, I have long since aspired to incorporate some form of light or sound within my work.

Thursday nights event was rather inspiring and so I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m dusting off my soldering iron again. Watch this space.

If you want to find out more about Dorkbot, and future events, you should check out the website here: http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotcardiff/
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