This weekend, I went to Makers Central at the NEC in Birmingham. And it was a lot of fun!

I got to catch up with robot builders Kevin MacAleer of Kevs Robots, a YouTuber and maker of excellent robot learning content, and we talked about how we create our robots. Dan from DanMakes Things was showing me his shoulder mounted Raspberry Pi based robot, and I talked microcontrollers with another robot builder DrJonEa.

I met with James Bruton (XRobotsUk), a maker of large 3D printed robots. I had a chat with Matt Denton, about his giant Lego robots and sharing 3D print stories. There were talks from makers Bobby Duke, and Colin Furze - I got to sit in the digger, and see the crowd-sourced 3D printed wall.

Keegan Neave of Neave Engineering was rebuilding a new NE-Five robot, in Gold, as a project in making the robot buildable by others, it was amazing watching the build progress throughout the weekend.

I had my photo taken by Mellow Labs using an Esp32, a camera, 3d printed case and thermal printer!

The show had many people in costumes, from Star Wars, as pirates, or wizards. There were 3D printer booths selling filaments, or amazing things they had made. There were CnC workshops, leather belt making and iron forging. I met Two Nerdy Girls who had made a full Bo Katan (Star Wars) prop set.

MadLab were there putting on soldering workshops with fun kits for kids, with their excellent BagPipes project kit among others, a descendent of the Stringy board. Kids Invent Stuff were also there, in a booth next to Colin Furze with a crazy bathtub contraption.

I met Designed to Make who was demonstrating their print-in-place underwater propeller assemblies, using magnetic gear and bearing systems, inductive charging and hall-effect based control mechanisms.

There were Lego makers, among them the designer of the Lego typewriter and a large model of an air balloon. Around the show were lifelike dragon puppets.

Book vouchers

I still have a show discount in place until the end of May 2025 for a 20% discount to pre-order my book, Learn Robotics Programming, 3rd Edition, or use the code “ROBOTICSPROG20” at checkout with Packt Publishing.

Star wars

There were so many Star Wars robots and costumes.

One large booth was DroidBuilders UK with members who make Star Wars Droids and other robot. There were R2D2’s, BB-8’s, Chopper (a personal favourite of mine), Open Duck, imperial mouse droids and many others. Some members were showing me the inside of a larger R2D2 head dome, with the articulation using many servo motors and controllers, fibre-optics for the displays and how they use DB connectors for making the signal cables connect well.

I rather like Chopper, an Astromech Droid with a lot of character.

This booth also had an [Open Duck Mini[(https://github.com/apirrone/Open_Duck_Mini) - a walking robot built with lots of neural net training against animated motion data for natural and adaptive walking. It’s heritage and style is definitely Star Wars, and it was a great build. Based on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W for it’s main controller, and only a few 18650’s for power, it was a very compact build.

Johnny Five

While NE-Five represents Johnny Five in terms of autonomous robots, there was also a full size remote control Johnny Five robot. It could drive, had buttons to speak or make gestures from the film and was full of character.

Robot wars

There was a Robot Wars style arena for kids to pay a small fee and play with rugged and fairly unbreakable battle robots, scoring hits on each other. The robots Apollo, Gnasher, Sir Killalot and Matilda were on display. There were other combat robot makers, and a small ant-weight arena too.

Peak moments

Some peak moments were seeing Johnny Five watching over the kids battling in the arena, with the expert operator puppetting him to follow robots around it. Another was seeing Chopper confront Johnny Five and the two robots sassing each other, their operators having great fun making them interact.

Towards the end of the second day, a black imperial coloured R2 unit drove up to a Dr Who TARDIS make, and played the Doctor who theme tune.

Watching Colin Furze talk about his most interesting, or dangerous moments was eye opening, although chatting with one of his team, it seems that the sand-hole was one of the more hairy moments!

Conclusion

I had a great time at Makers Central, and I am looking forward to next year. I’ll be back to meet makers, see more robots, costumes and props, and learn how other people are making their projects.

There was so much on that it’s a little hard to capture in a single blog post.

Note

All photos are my own. The robots and builds pictured in them belong to their respective makers.