A Record Cleaning Robot? Well, I like records. You know, LPs? Discs of vinyl? With grooves? For those that don't know, records can sound good when they are spotlessly clean, but cleaning them really well is hard and tedious and I am very lazy.

So instead of going through the work of manually cleaning hundreds recently acquired records, it makes way more sense to spend countless hours working at building a robot to scrub and vacuum that vinyl for me!

Ok, sure, maybe this sounds like an automatic record cleaning machine to you... but to me it is a Record Cleaning Robot. A mechanical minion. Silicon slave. Sort of a vinyl cleaning kobold, like the mythical Biersal, only for records!

Admittedly, it won't be able to pick the record out of my hand with a clenching plastic fist and pull it out of the cover and sleeve and scrub away with the charming personality of Rosie the Maid... but by gum, I'll get some sparkly clean records out of it!

Follow the build up at bot-thoughts.blogspot.com

Front Range Robotics Club is holding a robot firefighting contest on March 8, 2008 at the Discovery Science Center in Fort Collins, CO from 11AM-2PM. Looks like this is going to be a blast!

Despite having no time, I decided what the heck, why not enter, so I am in the middle of building my very first from-scratch robot, a prototype platform.

I am also applying Systems Engineering methodologies to the development of my firefighter to address major challenges of time, budget, and complexity.

You can read more about it at -- bot-thoughts.blogspot.com

Hope to see you at the competition!

Michael