Kickstarter

After a long stretch of broken parts, lost chunks of code, misaligned pulleys causing spray cans to swing like Tarzan, and the occasional smoking circuit board and exploding components, TagBot tagged successfully and accurately for the first time.

To improve things further, the morning after its first big print, Thingiverse decided to feature the designs of the spray can body.

Soon to come is a beefier code-base running on the arduino, and improvements to movement code that have caused unexpected behavior at speeds required to avoid bubbling paint.

There will also be redesigns in the physical robot, mounting more and more of the components on the print head, making it easier to sell and put together as an inexpensive kit.

And to all the donors and my friends and family, thank you for your patronage and support.

As always, you can track updates periodically here at Kickstarter, the code at GitHub, photos and videos from the trenches at the projects Tumblr blog, and updates and new designs to the hardware at Thingiverse.

Well after a mad dash to the finish line, Tag Bot was unfortunately a few small steps away from functioning in its full capacity at the Maker Faire. All of the parts worked individually, but the integrating the commands to trigger the can to start/stop spray in line with the motion-controlling code failed in the last hours before maker faire.

Work on the project is continuing now, and when it's all wrapped up I'll be demoing it anywhere and everywhere I can, including around the University of Central Florida and at FamiLAB's monthly open houses. I'm really excited to make good on my promise to demo this free of charge to creative and technically inspired people to get them working on what ideas move them and show the world where colors and code collide. 

Thank you again to all of you backers for helping me to realize this project in a scope more grand than I ever thought possible before this kickstarter.

You can track the progress of the development of the open hardware on Thingiverse, and the development of the code on GitHub, and all of the photos and videos and drawings and artwork produced at the project's Tumblr blog.

I'd like to thank everybody who donated to the project or worked to get the word out about what I'm doing here. The amount of support is overwhelming and has encouraged me to follow this project even further than I could ever have done before. It's also encouraged me to follow through and create an open-source kit that I can distribute to get TagBots like mine in the hands of the many. Check your inboxes for the surveys I'll be setting up and sending out to collect any information I'll need to get the rewards process going. 

Keep watching the GitHub repository for code updates, my Thingiverse page for thing updates and the Tumblr for photos and notes related to the progress!

As the funding deadline quickly approaches, I want to thank all of those who have backed the project so far. Your donations will allow me to build this project bigger, better and with higher quality parts than I would have imagined.

Back to the update: The MVP (minimum viable product) is getting closer and closer. Stripping down the first version of the software down to it's core and retackling it in a future-ready, clean and documentable way has been a big goal of mine and in addition to that I've been building and designing prototypes for the hardware. that will make this machine run. 

As a way to thank you for your overwhelming support, I've made a Tumblr blog of the project so I can easy make posts and add images from my iPod throughout development. You can visit it at tagbot.tumblr.com. More to come soon (slight hiatus because of finals, but I'll be back in full force next week).