I had a mad idea about Roaming Robots that I thought I'd run past Jonno (the head man) before I talked to you about it, because it might have been a no-go from the start, but it isn't, and he sounds interested. Here are the emails...
and here is his replyHi Jonno,
Just to reintroduce myself to you, I am Simon Windisch, and as a member of the antweight community, we shared a stand at London expo, as well as other events.
My son and I attended this afternoon's Easter robot rumble, and I had an idea that I thought I'd bounce off you, to see what you thought.
Today we watched 8-10 battles over two hours, and each fight had a 5-15 minute gap in-between. By the way we had a brilliant time.
Your announcers did a great job of filling the gaps, but on the way home I had an idea that we could have antweight battles as an additional "gap filler". I just counted the number of battles we had at the 21st Antweight World Series competition, and in the space of about two hours we had 63 battles.
Basically my idea is that we have two or three antweight battles when needed, we can have the robots ready. You can invite the younger members of the audience to watch directly and screen the battles (there always seems to be a projector around when I go to Expo) for the more sedentary members of the audience.
We can show little clips of the "best of" each robot about to battle and introduce them to the audience, but I'm getting ahead of myself. If you think this idea has any validity, then let me know, we'll see if we can take it further.
All the best, and see you soon at the next Expo, no doubt (I assume that Marco is liasing with you as usual?)
Simon
and my reply to himThanks for the email.
We tried to do this before but for some reason didn't
get very far, but i agree it has mileage.
There are a few things we need to make this work.
1) a projector, and screen, i have been meaning to buy
one for ages maybe it is time !!
2) frequencies, do you have a current list of
frequencies of your competitors, this is the main
stumbling black last time, as they have to be on
separate frequencies so they don't interfere with the
proceedings, with the introduction of 2.4ghz this must
be easier now.
3) inviting audience around if difficult as we had
problems with viewing past a couple of rows of people.
I am willing to work on it though.
So sorry for not mentioning this before, but I thought it would be best to see if Roaming Robots were interested first.That sounds great. I haven't put it to my antweight buddies yet. I was waiting for your response.
1. I'll find out who brought along the projector to the antweight events I've been to. We'll need a screen as well, I think, perhaps to go in front of the heavyweight arena so the grownups can watch fom their seats.
2. We can stick to the bottom five frequencies, as we did at Aylesbury a couple of years back, and at Excel last year, although some of us now have 2.4GHz sets.
3. It might work if just the kids watch it live, and the rest watch the screen?
Oh yes, mentioning Aylesbury reminds me of something. We did attend Aylesbury in 2005, but didn't go in 2006 because you implemented a single membership fee to roaming robots which was a bit too steep for us antweight people, especially as we don't have the same safety costs as feather/heavyweights. Could this be negotiable?
Simon