Chocolate Santa (an affectionate nickname for Tony, our UPS guy) just picked up the first 40 MOSS kits from our little factory at Modular Robotics.  They’re headed out to our first 40 Kickstarter backers and thus, today marks an exciting milestone.  After almost three years in development, we’re shipping the MOSS Robot Construction System!  And it’s awesome. Did you pledge on Kickstarter or pre-order for a MOSS Basic Builder Kit?  Ho, ho!  I have some good news for you.  We decided to upgrade all Basic Builder Kits to the Zombonitron 1600 Kit.  Extra parts!  In addition to everything that was in the Basic Builder, you’ll get a Brightness Sensor, an extra Corner Block, two extra Double Spans, and 26 more Steel Spheres.   In the months between the Kickstarter campaign and now, we’ve been building thousands of MOSS robots, and it turns out that these extra parts really expand the universe of robots that you can build with this kit. We had estimated that we’d be able to ship in February, and we’re finally opening the MOSS pipeline in the last days of March.  If our delay screwed with your kid’s birthday or was annoying in another way, please accept my apology: I’m sorry we were late! Honestly though, I’m blown away by how quickly and efficiently team Modbot moved to get MOSS from prototype to product.  MOSS has hundreds of parts in it, most are completely custom, and we’re assembling and testing everything in our own shop in Boulder, CO.  The complexity of this effort is astounding and I find myself extremely impressed that we’re shipping only a month or two late.  Cubelets took a year longer than planned and every other physical gadget I’ve supported on Kickstarter has shipped with a far longer delay than MOSS. Last week I ended up in Valdez, Alaska.  It just happens to be the 25^th anniversary of the oil spill, which I remember vividly watching and reacting to as a twelve year old.  That event did a lot to shape the way that I think about the world, but that’s another story.  Valdez is the end of the Trans Alaska pipeline, and seeing all of that infrastructure made me think a little bit about the Modular Robotics production pipeline that creates tiny robots and sends them out into the world.  Over the last month we’ve been able to assemble some MOSS modules but we’ve been waiting on parts to assemble others.  That creates a sort of MOSS reservoir at the beginning of the pipeline.  In the last week, as we’ve finally been able to build the few remaining modules in the Zombonitron 1600 kit, we’ve been able to open the valve and start shipping.  Right now it feels like we’re running only a trickle of water through our pipeline because we’re triple-testing everything and improving processes as we go.  But we’ve designed our pipeline to hold thousands and thousands of tiny robots at a time, so it’ll be fun to watch the volume increase over the next few months. Kickstarter backers and pre-order friends, we’re amped to send out MOSS to you soon.  We don’t have an exact schedule of who gets what when yet, but as our pipeline stabilizes a bit and we have enough data to project, we’ll post better delivery estimates here.  For everyone else, we’ll have MOSS available on our web site as soon as we get the pre-orders out the door!  In the meantime, here are a few MOSS robots to tide you over.

We’re making a lot of progress transitioning MOSS from prototype to product. Engineering design was locked several months ago, injection moulds are made, and plastics for our first production run (to fulfill kickstarter pledges) will arrive in Boulder this week. We’ve already started to produce circuit boards on our SMT fabrication line!  Steel ball bearings are here and threaten to collapse our floor. Colors are locked, and they’re gorgeous.  The photo below is a little wonky and still doesn’t show the colors accurately, but we just shot beautiful new pro photos and I’ll post them asap.  We vacillated a lot with color selection, made a last-hour decision to switch to a two-color face scheme, and then reversed that in a last-minute decision to in favor of the original four-color face scheme:

• Green = Power
• Red = Data Output
• Brown = Data Input
• Blue = Pass-through

We’re still on track to get the first MOSS kits out the door in February!

Urban Dictionary defines this divine device as: A fridge modified to contain a keg and dispense beer. What’s needed: old fridge, drill, tap, facuet, hose, CO2 tank, CO2 regulatior, and a keg. A quality home improvement for the weekend warrior. We welcome you, our Kegerator from Mobile, AL. Yet another large machine for our factory and offices, and cause for a wonderful, spontaneous use of the word “majestic!” I suggest it receives a royal name befitting its status.      

Well, now!  That was fun.  The Kickstarter campaign for MOSS ran for a month, attracted pledges from 1578 would-be robot builders, and generated $361,293. Work on MOSS continues at full speed at Modular Robotics.  All of our injection molded plastic parts are here, though some many of them need small changes.  The colors are getting closer too!  These whites are a little bit off and the face colors are a little dull and unsaturated, but you get the idea.

The cool thing about construction kits is that there are so many of them. A good construction kit abstracts something difficult away and lets kids build at a level that they wouldn’t normally be able to build at on their own. LEGO® abstracts away joinery, Erector Sets abstract away measurement, MOSS abstracts a lot of the complexity involved in kinematics, and Cubelets asbtract away the Sense, Think, and Act behaviors that make a robot. Now, with these little adapter plates, you can combine the best parts of Cubelets and LEGO® to build robots that not only function, but do so with flair.  They’re simple: little yellow plastic plates with a Cubelet connector on one side and a LEGO® connector on the other.  From now through the end of the day on December 2, we’re including a free four-pack of Brick Adapters with every Cubelets order over $75.

It’s been a fun few days!  We launched MOSS on Kickstarter on Thursday and hit the $100k goal in less than 12 hours.  The pledges continue to roll in.  We’ve been celebrating and a fair number of us are committed to a round of Car Bombs at every hundred thousand dollars. We’re psyched, but not surprised.  We picked $100k as a goal because we thought that we could hit it on the first day and that that success would be a whole story in itself.  The whole point of launching on kickstarter was to make a broad impact.  I’ll write about our decision to launch on kickstarter and the results later, though.  Now I’d like to address software.  Some people have asked about reprogramming MOSS modules.  Please forgive my long-form answer. There are a few “levels of play” with MOSS.  Out of the box, people can snap modules and spheres together to build all sorts of reactive robots: robots that react to their environment by sensing and actuating. With an iOS or Android device handy, kids can pair with a Bluetooth Module in a MOSS robot and control and communicate with their robot.  By February, we’ll have the three first apps (all free) ready to use.  MOSS Control is a panel of sliders that allows you to remote control (or remotely read data) on any of the 8 faces on the Bluetooth Module.  MOSS Log can graph (and export) sensor values over time, and MOSS Etch is a drawing program that can use Knobs, Distance sensors, and other various modules as inputs. Advanced users and older kids will hopefully want to reprogram their MOSS modules.  And they will be able to!  But we haven’t decided exactly how.  At modbot, we all reprogram our MOSS Bluetooth modules by digging deep into C source code and sticking a little ISP header made from pogo pins onto an exposed PCB.  But this is not the way to encourage kids to program. For Cubelets, we exposed an API to enable people to reprogram in C, but on the level of “neighbors” and “sensors” instead of pin change interrupts and all of the nasty little bits that go along with microcontroller programming.  We built Cubelets Code to reprogram from a browser window and Cubelets Studio as a standalone mac program.  We’ve learned a lot from these experiments. Yes, you will be able to reprogram MOSS modules by writing C code.  But we haven’t decided what’s next from there.  We’re thinking about the API and at what level people can best interact with MOSS.  We’re playing with boxes and arrows languages like Max/MSP and block languages like Scratch.  We’ve discussed open sourcing everything.  We have a crazy idea about using Finite State Machines to program MOSS.  We’ve thought about using Arduino.  Should we virtual machine it?  It’s super fun testing out all of the options as part of our design process for a programming system, but right now we don’t know exactly where it’s going to end up! Oh, did you make it all the way to the end and get a little disappointed because there aren’t any robots here?  I did too.  How about this card conveying robot?  It was Neville’s idea, Jon built it, and I get to show it off.

I love Cubelets. I feel like my identity is pretty closely tied to those little robotic cubes. You might have discovered Cubelets just now, or maybe you’ve had a kit for a year, but I’ve been working on Cubelets since 2006. That’s a decent chunk of my adult life! It feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve been able to show off something brand new, so it’s particularly exciting for me to introduce you to MOSS. MOSS is a brand-new construction kit for building dynamic little robots.  We’ve been working on it in secret for almost three years and we’re launching on Kickstarter. The video does a far better job of explaining how it works than I could here, so please take a look!