How to make an 18 ft tall robot and celebrate Firefox 3 in style
A Robot is born...
The idea was was born, as many fine ideas are, over a Burrito lunch. A day of collaborative robot building to celebrate the launch of Firefox 3. We had just the venue, Dolores Park, which has a striking resemblance to the Gran Paradiso theme of Firefox 3.
Step One: Shout from the digital mountain tops
Step one in building a giant robot is get lots of people to help. It is way more fun and entertaining than doing it all by your self. We contacted all our extension developer friends and got lots of people excited to participate. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Heroku we even had a budget for supplies.
We setup a snazy invite and before we knew it people had posted about the party on Yelp , and Instructables. Word of the crazy party spread over Twitter and Pownce, the power of the internet took hold and in no time we had an army of robot builders.
We created a Wiki to help coordinate. With stuff like robot blue prints and a supply list.
Step Two: Figure stuff out
We had no idea how we were actually going to build the robot. We honed our skills making a smaller mock robot. We learned that using a chicken wire base with aluminum foil skin and some lite framing of wood was probably the best approach. We assembled supplies from dumpsters and hardware store.
Step Three: Build the robot
We got setup in the park at 2pm and the sun was shining. We made sure to have enough robot building fuel ie pizza, and sangria to keep everyone running. We also had a friend from a chemistry department bring dry ice and liquid nitrogen, which we used for special effects and to make cryogenic Firefox icecream (carrot and blueberry, a flavor we made up).
The day was a huge success with probably 100 people participating and the robot getting built in about 5 hours. The final moments of assembly were captured on film. No one was sure that the thing would stand up
We had hundreds of curious on lookers and when the robot actually stood on its own the entire park erupted in cheers. Thanks to everyone who came out and helped, a special thanks is owed to Alex Polvi, Mary Colvig, James Lindenbaum, Amir Nathoo, James Brady, Mat Donne and Mitchell Baker.
