My primary obligation for Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 17x) was to co-present The Trouble with Rovers with Lan Dang on Saturday afternoon. Which meant when Sawppy’s coupler broke Friday evening I had to scramble to fix it for Saturday. A rush repair job is always going to leave some details to be desired but it was sufficient to resume operation.

Sawppy will obviously be one of the visual aids present at our talk, but that doesn’t mean it gets to spend the rest of the day just sitting around. No sir, as soon as Sawppy arrived on location, it immediately started working as a roving billboard for both itself and the talk.

It was not explicitly coordinated beforehand, but the SGVHAK rover was also equipped with advertising for our talk. Both of our rovers were out and about, pulling roving billboard duty, and occasionally our paths crossed in the hallways of SCaLE.

I was happy with the turnout for our rover session. While we did lose a few people who left partway through the talk, it was more than made up for by the enthusiastic people who followed along and came up to ask questions after. I had a lot of fun explaining details on what we did for both rovers, minutiae that we trimmed from the talk proper but was still interesting to our smaller and more technical audience afterwards.

Sawppy continued to roam around Pasadena Convention Center, spreading word of my rover project to people who are excited about the possibility of building their own. Some people thought it would be their motivation to finally buy their own 3D printer, others have all the tools on hand and it’s just a matter of prioritization and finding project time. I was most gratified by a group of students from California State University San Bernardino who thinks it would be a great group project. They are exactly the target audience!

And it’s fun as always to see young children’s faces light up when they see Sawppy, some of whom were eager to take control. My favorite was this 6-year old who loved to drive Sawppy over his own toes over and over.

(Cross-posted to NewScrewdriver.com)