A circle of HullPixelbots

The Hull Pixelbot is a small robot that was born in Hull. It carries pixels, so it is a pixelbot. It is designed to be simple to build, fun to play with and, above all, cheap to make. The chassis is made from 3D printed parts and the electronics and motors needed to get a robot up and running can be purchased for less than 10 pounds.

You can use it anywhere you need a tiny, mobile, pixel. It’s a great way to explore programing and robotics. If you want to take fun photographs you can use it to spice up the lighting in them (the pixels can be very bright) or take long exposure photographs and make snazzy light trails.

We’ve got people trying to make a robot that will seek out the lightest part of a room, others trying to map out an area and some just getting together for the fun of building something. It is a great way to get started working with electronics, computing and robotics.

But we want to make art with it. We want to get at least 100 Hull Pixelbots into an arena and set them running. Robotics researchers call this “Investigating Emergent Behaviour”. We call it “seeing what happens”. We’ve got plans to make one big “Robot Network” to choreograph the event and we might even add music. We’re planning events as part of the Hull City of Culture 2017. And we are meeting up every couple of weeks to build up our robot army. You can come along too. Sign up for our meetups here

Rob Miles, the creator of Hull Pixelbot has a micro-site about the robots on his blog you can find here

You can see a video of the robots in action here

For the entire GitHub site, including all the software, you can go here

For techie details you can find an overview of the Hull Pixelbot design in the documentation folder which you can find here.

For 3D printable files you can go here

You can follow @hullpixelbot for pixelbot news.