A few days ago I noticed a sudden spike in internet traffic to Sawppy – page views on my personal blog, Sawppy’s Hackaday.io project page, the Github repo, and YouTube video all rose dramatically. It took a little digging around various statistics reporting pages to figure out where the interest was coming from. Answer: someone had submitted Sawppy to Hacker News giving Sawppy a brief taste of internet fame.

Given the general attention span of the internet at large, the traffic disappeared just as quickly as it came. But in that brief moment in time, a few thousand people spared a few seconds (or more) of their lives to look over Sawppy and that’s more than what I had before.

And this bit of exposure might lead to other interesting projects down the line. It seems to have caught the eye of someone with interest in the Pi Wars robot competition. Sawppy’s current configuration is indeed controlled by a Raspberry Pi, but according to contest rules Sawppy is too big to fit as-is. I’m not sure a six-wheeled rocker-bogie suspension would be useful for any contest objectives (challenges) in Pi Wars. But it would absolutely make my day if I see one of the competitors downscale Sawppy to fit in the size envelope, thereby creating a “Sawppy Jr.”

https://twitter.com/pinski1_/status/1061997311843287041

(Cross-posted to NewScrewdriver.com)