A very good friend of ours had a birthday last Sunday (yes, the guy who is behind Digital Day).

We wondered what gift to invent for him. We wanted the gift to be original, technological, funny, and, if possible, geeky.

Well, Ani had a bright idea! We must make a… robot from old computer parts!

We disasembled an old Pentium II based computer (and old “Fujitsu”, which was lying around for ages, and didn’t work at all), and 8 hours of hard work later, one two robots were born.

The smaller one was Ani’s personal invention (he is now standing proudly in one corner of our room, btw.)

“Robi 2” was nice, had cute little head and curious, questioning gaze.

But his elder brother is the one that I’d like to present to you in more detail (that was the one which we gave as present to our friend).

He’s name is VKDE-T1000/Y2009.

Here are a few photographs:

If you look closely at the details in the photos, you’ll probably recognize common computers parts, such as:

• a lot of electric capacitors, removed from the Pentium II motherboard,
• parts of a 1.44″ floppy drive,
• parts of a standard CD-ROM,
• a few motors, including a CD-ROM tray motor, CD-ROM motor for moving the laser beam, and a few others,
• LEDs which indicate ‘ON’, ‘Stand-By’, ‘HDD activity’,
• cam-gear wheels,
• large power supply capacitors,
• a small heatsink which was cooling some microchip on the motherboard,
• RAM modules holders,
• etc.

Most of the parts were glued together with epoxy resin. The design of the robot is the result of our combined efforts. And if you’d like to know more details, I would gladly answer your questions here!

As a final note, I’d like to add that the base of the robot rotates 360 degrees, his head, too, as well as his nose, and that at the tip of his head, where the hat ends, you can screw in some optional accessories via a standard screw:-)

And you can also remove the robot from his rotating base, as it is kept there by the force of a hidden 1.44 Floppy magnet!

The VKDE-T1000 is the only existing prototype for now, and he is unique in the whole world, but who knows? If we can get hold of more old Pentium II computers in the future, maybe we’ll be able to create a few brothers and sisters for him? ;-)