At the start of the year, I set myself a wild challenge: to bring a full-scale Elektro to the Nerdearla technology conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Building a robot is always complex, but fabricating a steel giant with almost no resources borders on madness.

The structural work was led by Mauro de Giuseppe with help from his students at EPS N°1 in General Las Heras, a trade school that equips young people from vulnerable backgrounds with hands-on skills for future jobs.

The first step was sourcing a mountain of scrap metal. We worked with 25-liter air compressors, refrigeration tanks, refrigerator compressors, steel curtain tubes, shock absorbers, bearings, and various parts from old stoves and washing machines. The pieces were cut, welded with MIG and arc welders, assembled, and finally polished down with flap discs.

In parallel, I worked on Elektro’s “brain” using an ESP board. For speech, I wired up a DFPlayer Mini feeding into an amplifier and then into two 20-watt speakers. I wrote a function to move the jaw in sync with the audio. 

To make Elektro “smoke,” I rigged up a motor driver, a reversed fan, and a 3D-printed funnel. While Elektro can operate autonomously, I also set up an access point to trigger manual actions such as smoking, muting, or controlling the audio. As an easter egg, at random moments Elektro broadcasts an encoded message via ggwave.

In a museum in Ohio stands the original Elektro, alongside a replica. Now, 8,700 kilometers away, there’s a third Elektro—one of a kind—assembled from recycled materials, ingenuity, and collective effort.