Why Half Robot?

I've always liked to build things.  My favorite toy when I was really young was rope.  I loved to tie knots and I would tie things up all over the house.  My dad told me that one day I tied the vacuum cleaner up so well it took 20 minutes to free it.  I would often string ropes across my bedroom and tie them together into a giant web-like net, then hang toys off the various ropes.

Around when I was seven, I got a Robosapien toy robot for Christmas.  It was two feet tall, and it could walk, move, dance and fart, which seemed really funny.  Right away I thought robots were cool.

After that, I discovered the Lego Mindstorms robot platform and started asking for one.  When I was eight I got one as a gift and soon after that I started a First Lego League team with some friends.  FLL was challenging, but we made it past the local qualifier and won a judges choice award against fifty other teams at the regional championships.  Through participating in FLL I started to realize that I was decent at building things, or what my dad calls mechanical engineering.

Now I'm thirteen and my interest in robots has really taken off.  I still do FLL every year, and now robot-building has become my biggest hobby.  Since I'm more interested in design and mechanics, I mainly use the Lego Power Functions and Lego Technics platforms for my experiments.  When I'm not doing homework or playing soccer I tend to build bots, and on a good day I might build several different designs.  One of my favorite things is to battle robots against each other.  Basically I think robots are awesome, and my dad jokes that I am half robot, so that's what I decided to name my blog.

I am going to use this blog to keep track of some of my creations and the thoughts that occur to me as I'm building and experimenting.  Hopefully I can help others with some of my ideas.