Hal, the Evadot bot.
A little about Hal the robot
Hal is a real robot. He's short, about 8 inches tall. His "brain" is an Arduino Duemilanove circuit board. He's cool, and a little temperamental at the moment. When we present at events, he comes with us. If you want to build him, or something like him, drop us a line and we'll give you the parts list to get started.
Hal is part an ongoing education and outreach program including some current and future programs:
- Hal has his own comic
- The robot accompanies us on most public appearances
- He's a part of our upcoming series of TV/Webcast specials
- He's often causing trouble around the office
In true geek fashion, meaning "scratch your own itch" this was born out of a simple need we had. We were trying to easily track all 20 of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competitors in one place. The XPRIZE site is great, but we wanted a little more. A snapshot of things. Then we realized that we wanted a list of commercial space companies, and then a list of prizes/contests, sorted by age group... the list went on and on.
Hal was born out of a long list of these needs. We figured if we needed something like this, why not make it available in case other people do too. He's an experiment. You can help us make our experiment a success by contributing to Hal.
He's an ongoing project and wont ever be done if we're doing our jobs right
Want to contribute? Great! See the Feedback button on the left of your browser screen? That's one way. Another is to start adding companies to the database here. We'll scrub them for content (ie, you're not a spammer are you?) and then they'll appear here in a few hours. There's going to be bugs, help us squash them.
Have an awesome day! Make sure you get out there and participate. The world is a big place and there's lots of work to do.