It’s been too long since we walked on the Moon | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

Well the BotsIQ competition came and went in a blazing two days. While that wrapped up most of the filming for the documentary (with a few post-competition interviews left) there’s still a long road ahead in first sorting all the footage, and then editing it all. As I go through stuff I’ll be posting more clips.

In the meantime here’s a cool shot Sir Cam-a-bot (more info coming soon) caught inside the arena. Witch Doctor was a beast.

(I post lots of updates on the Facebook Page, which trickles down to Twitter. Keep updated there)

Just finished lighting the arena. I’ve been helping build it since Saturday. It’s a beast.

I’ve also found myself living on the roof of the arena for the past few days too. I think I might have been a cat in another life, hoping from beam to beam.

Early registration starts tomorrow. Then more registration. Then the battles. It’ll be insanity meets awesomeness. And it’s National Robotics Week! Let the fun begin!

Here’s a clip from Colbert’s piece on Obama announcing the end of the Constellation program, the thing that was supposed to take us back to the moon. You know, that place that we managed to go to 40 years ago before iPads or cellphones or the internet.

Even more interesting is the interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who gives an awesome speech and explanation that manned space flight is the best recruiting tool to get kids interested in science. Unfortunately I can’t embed that (nor can you watch this on Hulu – thanks Viacom) so you’ll have to view it in the whole episode, which you can see here.

Exciting news – the other day Bots High was the featured Kickstarter Project of the Day!

About a week left to go – please help out and donate today!

Robot Building Time – Time Lapse Montage from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

For the past few weeks I’ve been filming time lapse shots of teams building their robots. I set the camera to take one picture every second and when you play it back you get a lot of time condensed. It’s cool to watch stuff built really quickly.

This could very well be a part 1 of 2 as there will only be much more robot building in the week leading up to competition.

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Above is a poster idea I had for Starbot, the not-for-profit robot workshop that sort of serves as the unifying hub of all the robotics programs in South Florida. It’s inspired by a pep-talk Nola (head of Startbot and BotsIQ) gives to all the robotics classes, which is there’s 6 billion people in the world, and “this many [hold fingers up] build robots.” For the poster’s case I changed it to kids, because that’s what it’s all about.

Still needs some tweaking and grunge-ing, but I like it.

(I should probably add a disclaimer that it’s definitely not to scale)

Twitter celebrated its 4th birthday this past Sunday (March 21). Look at the first Tweet here.

Summer of 2008 I was able to interview Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter. I’m sure today he wouldn’t have time to sit down with some college kids in the Twitter HQ, so I was lucky I got him when I did (the interview was actually pushed back because he had to go on Fox to talk about Obama announcing Biden as his running mate on Twitter).

I think what he says is really interesting, not just about Twitter but how we communicate as a society.

Check it out and please share and rate it if you like it:

Bots High – Robotics Documentary – Teaser Trailer from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

We’re about 4 weeks away from the grand finale – the National High School BattleBots Championship. So far I’ve mostly been filming everything myself, but this time I’m bringing in more crew, more cameras, more epicness – to do things right and make sure everything is covered.

However, the epicness does not come cheap, which is why I started a Kickstarter project. Basically Kickstarter is a cool way to fund projects where people pledge money to reach a goal, and that money is only deducted from your account if the project is fully funded.

So the project is to raise funds to film the championship with multi-cameras, and also to travel to San Francisco to film the regular BattleBots competition, which has an open class where some of the high school teams will compete. Plus I want to interview the cool people out in SF.

So please check out the Bots High Kickstarter page and consider becoming a backer. Like PBS, there’s different rewards for different levels. You can get a DVD, poster, t-shirt, associate producer credit, and all sorts of other stuff.

Thanks for your support (I need it)!