Some assorted findings in my repetoire:

FIRST THINGS FIRST!
Motolola, my robotics team's robot. She took two months to build, and she competed in three US FIRST Robotics Competitions, the Wisconsin Regional, the Midwest Regional, and the FIRST Championships. Overall, we placed 12th internationally. The electronics that communicated between the controller (an Xbox 360 controller) and the raw alluminum were provided for us, but we had to actually wire the robot, program it, and construct the frame. Notice how the wheels are set up, it allows it to travel in any direction!





The competition changes every year. This year's challenge was to put innertubes on a giant octagonal iron rack while preventing the other robot team from scoring points. It was super robot tic tac toe!

Here's an example match :



FIRST Robotics was really a giant dream machine project. Every team is given parts and a goal, and every team across the country comes up with their own design and way of accomplishing that goal.

OTHER THINGS:

A robotics fair in Osaka, Japan. There is a crab-like robot in the video that can transform to accommodate many different situations, check it out!



A neat website:
www.hackaday.com
While it's mostly a tutorial site for really advanced projects, they have everything from legos to case mods to laser graffiti projected on 30 story buildings. Regularly updated, it's fun to read through the articles.

Good forum:
http://forums.rotofugi.com/
This is the forum for a local store that specializes in designer vinyl toys and customizable toys. While it's mostly for toy collecting, it's a great resource for learning how to paint on materials similar to the ones we'll be dealing with. Look in the 'customs' section for inspiration!

Green Dream Machine:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/7695555/?qo=28&q=case+mod&qh=boost%3Apopular+age_sigma%3A24h+age_scale%3A5

Sorry for not embedding urls into text, I'm sure you all can handle it though!

-Adrian Choy