The first public appearance of Bootstrap in its final form was at the Makercon event outside of Tampa, Florida on April 18. Makercon is hosted by the Gulf Coast Makers and featured a variety of robotics exhibits and demonstrations, as well as other maker fair.

The event produced some useful feedback on the design of Bootstrap and a number of prospective builders identified themselves and received a small starter kit. I hope to feature some of their builds in future blog entries. In addition, the first prototype of Bootstrap ran around inside a small box from 9 am to 6 pm (using several sets of batteries in the process) without incident. So the event was a good test of the durability of the ‘bot. Under continuous motion the battery life with 3 AA batteries seems to be about 70 minutes.

The next public event for Bootstrap will probably be Orlando Makerfaire, scheduled for September 12 & 13, 2015. Partial kits will again be available for interested builders.