I love conversations with Oscar. He’s excited about getting Cubetto, a robot programming toy I’ve backed on Kickstarter, which won’t arrive for a couple more months (fingers crossed!)

He wanted to know why we can’t get it now, so I told him about Kickstarter and getting people on the Internet to help you build your ideas. He says he’d “like to make an idea using the nin-ternet”. After a bit of thought his idea is to make a robot as big as Daddy, so we had a look at the Ed Snowden telepresence robot and decided we could build it out of Lego and an iPad, although I’m not sure how we’ll control the wheels. He loved the thought of having a robot pretending to be him downstairs while he’s controlling it upstairs.

And then Oscar wanted to find Ed and ask him about how he built his robot so we talked about why Ed is hard to find and people want to put him in jail. Oscar reckons we should put in jail the people that wanna put Ed in jail. Proud daddy moment!

Anyway… Does anyone have any idea how to build a Lego motorised robot that can be controlled by an iPad over the internet??? I have a feeling this could be a loooong project in the making…

— Matthew Russell