This year's Seattle Mini MakerFaire was really exciting for us because we got to show off our upcoming product, the Arachnio Due! The most common comment I received about the original Arachnio is that it needed an ARM chip. I took that to heart after we didn't reach our original funding goal and I'm proud to introduce the Arachnio Due, with replaces the earlier ATmega32u4 with an Atmel SAM4S, which is an ARM Cortex-M4 running at 120 MHz.
Check out our project progress on hackaday.io or sign up for our mailing list to receive notifications when the Arachnio Due is ready to launch on Kickstarter.
In order to show off the Arachnio Due, I built a pair of sumo bots using the cellphone control code Jeremy wrote for the original. The EMP event folks are very cool and helpful, and were able to get us a nice round table to fit our playing field (laser cut at Metrix Create Space) at nearly the last minute.
The sumo bots were really popular, and it was great to see people really get how cool it is to have an Arduino variant that can connect to your phone or any other wifi network. I built them with the cheap Tamiya dual motor gearboxes, so they needed a fair amount of maintenance -- Alex did a great job keeping them running through most of the fair.
Our booth during setup. We got another table and a fence around the playing field on the right.
The Arachnio sumo bots on the play field, ready for action! The Arachnio Dues are the green boards with blue lights. The driver boards were created for these bots, and will probably appear in the Kickstarter as a stretch goal.
Victory!
My son pushes my bot out of the ring.
The Couch Armada arrives to check out the Arachnio Due
