It started in a Bendigo workshop
Back in 2018, before AI made any of this easy, I built a robot from scratch in my workshop in Bendigo. I cut the timber for the chassis by hand, took an angle grinder to the wheel shafts, trimmed the wheels down to fit, and sourced the motors myself, then wired them straight to the drivetrain. A Raspberry Pi handled the computer vision and an Arduino ran the motors.
It didn’t do much. It rolled around, it saw a little. But building it, the cutting and the wiring and the coaxing it into actually moving, was some of the most fun I’ve had. Programming it back then was a pain, with no language models to lean on, which somehow made getting it to work feel even better.
Then Yuri asked a strange question
At work, my mate Yuri came up and asked how big a load my robot could take. He was planning a Star Wars themed birthday for Sophie, and he wanted a real, moving R2-D2. I said let’s do it.
Yuri built the whole shell himself, an R2-D2 body out of MDF, sanded and painted right down to the blue and silver dome. I gutted my original robot and moved its drivetrain and brains into the casing, then added a small speaker so it could play sound. The little Bendigo rover was suddenly a droid. It could drive in, stop on cue, and play music.
The reveal
This was the part that made all the wiring worth it. A friend dressed up as Princess Leia and recorded a message, and when R2-D2 rolled into the room we played the Leia video on the TV. So the droid turned up in person to deliver her hologram, right on cue.
Sophie’s face when she saw it is something I still think about.
Looking back
It was pre-AI, and it was stubborn and fiddly and sometimes maddening to program. I’d do it again tomorrow. It’s still one of my favourite things I’ve made, mostly because a pile of timber and a couple of motors turned into a birthday nobody there has forgotten.