I brought Sawppy to Sparklecon VII because I'm telling the story of Sawppy's life so far. It's also an environment where a lot of people would appreciate the little miniature Mars rover running amongst them.

Sparklecon 2020 2 Sawppy near battlebot arena

Part of it was because a battlebot competition was held at Sparklecon, with many teams participating. I'm not entirely sure what the age range of participants were, because some of the youngest may just be siblings dragged along for the ride and the adults may be supervising parents. While Sawppy is not built for combat, some of the participants still have enough of a general interest of robotics to took a closer look at Sawppy.

Sparklecon 2020 3 Barb video hosting survey

First talk I attended was Barb relaying her story of investigating video hosting. Beginning of 2020 ushered in some very disruptive changes in YouTube policies of how they treat "For Kids" video. But as Barb explains, this is less about swear words in videos and more about Google tracking. Many YouTube content authors including Barb were unhappy with the changes, so Barb started looking elsewhere.

Sparklecon 2020 4 Sawppy talk

The next talk I was present for was my own, as I presented Sawppy's story. Much of the new material in this edition were the addition of pictures and stories of rovers built by other people around the country and around the world. Plus we recorded a cool climbing capability demonstration:

https://youtu.be/SEBBMDWgtC4

Sparklecon 2020 5 Emily annoying things

Emily gave a version of the talk she gave at Supercon. Even though some of us were at Supercon, not all of us were able to make it to her talk. And she brought different visual aids this time around, so even people who were at the Supercon talk had new things to play with.

Sparklecon 2020 6 8 inch floppy drive

After we gave our talks, the weight was off our shoulders and we started exploring the rest of the con. During some conversation, Dual-D of NUCC dug up an old school eight inch floppy drive. Here I am failing to insert a 3.5" floppy disk in that gargantuan device.

Sparklecon 2020 7 sand table above

Last year after Supercon I saw photographs of a sand table and was sad that I missed it. This year I made sure to scour all locations to make sure I can find it if it was present. I found it in the display area of the Plasmatorium drawing "SPARKLE CON" in the sand.

Sparklecon 2020 8 sand table below

Here's the mechanism below - two stepper motors with belts control the works.

Sparklecon 2020 9 tesla coil winding on lathe

There are full sized manual (not CNC) lathe and mill at 23b shop, but I didn't get to see them run last year. This year we got to see a Tesla coil winding get built on the lathe.

For last year's Sparklecon Day 2 writeup, I took a picture of a rather disturbing Barbie doll head transplanted on top of a baseball trophy. And I hereby present this year's disturbing transplant.

Sparklecon 2020 WTF

Sawppy has no idea what to do about this... thing.