This week we delivered a low-key workshop on tanglebots at Bare Project’s Common Threads festival on the Moor in Sheffield. A tanglebot is a weaving robot that isn’t very good at its job. Or maybe you could say a weaving robot is a tanglebot that isn’t very good at its job. Most people who came to the workshop hadn’t made a robot before, but everyone had made tangles before, so we had a lot of experts in attendance.
The tanglebots are made mostly of lolly sticks, hot glue and small servo motors, with some added googly eyes for good measure. The servo motors are connected to an “Inventor 2040W” microcontroller, which is a Raspberry Pi Pico on a board with lots of outputs. It’s specifically designed for building small robots, so it can be run by battery and receive commands over the WiFi. Due to some technical wizardry from Ray and Alex, we were able to run a local server, and control the robots using code in Strudel (Ray is in the process of writing up all the technical details of the project if you want to run something like this in your community! We’ll add the link here when it’s ready.)
Common Threads is running until Saturday 12th September and they have a wonderful participator programme taking place in their live-woven “living room” on the Moor.
Here are some of the robots made by the group:
Pink’s tanglebot
