I got this email recently, and I thought I would share it verbatim, as I don’t think I could capture his passion.

In recognition of the 20th anniversary of BEAM,  I will be announcing a new contest that will be sponsored in part by G-Prime.   No spoilers yet, however.  Read below and get tinkering though – news forthcoming!

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your reply. Sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you quickly, work has been taking up all my time lately. Anyway I thought I’d send you a few pictures of some bots I built with recycled materials and components. The first bot I ever built probably has the most recycled parts on it probably because I was a student at the time .

You can check out some pics on flickr and post them on your blog if you’d like.

You can also check out some of my youtube vids as well, if you want to see my Rocket pummer and Shadow guide robot in action (2 separate videos) .

Recently my colleague and friend, Chris, has started up a not-for-profit group (called United Greenworks) that recycles old consumer electronics and other materials. The main goal of the group is to reduce the amount of re-usable electronic/mechanical components & other building materials that are filling up our landfills or that are going to foreign countries as e-waste. The group has been very successful in Grande Prairie on a small scale thus far and as a result Chris (who is also a robot builder) and I (and others) have been salvaging an abundance of very useful motors, chips, solenoids, wires, connectors, sensors, power supplies and switches out of old PC’s, printers, audio equipment, and Photocopiers. Photocopiers are the holy grail for us robot guys, just one has everything you need to make a bunch of bots for years to come. We have 6 photocopiers coming to us and it seems like just the beginning.

Chris and I are both passionate about the environment, electronics, and building robots and would love to show people and share with people how to reuse old electronics for new projects such as robotics. We would also like to share some of the free parts we are accumulating with other robot enthusiasts. I myself am a big fan of BEAM bots and the whole junkbot/solar concept and would love to see a category at the Western Canadian Robot Games that incorporated this area of robotics.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration Mark! Oh and thanks for the Sparkfun Freeday post, it’s nice to see others frequent that blog, Chris and I aren’t the only ones.

Regards,

Jeremie (aka skater_j10)