It’s not the droid you're looking for. Actually, it may be exactly the droid you're looking for and it's just one of a whole bunch of high-tech creations you can have, if you just put in some good old fashioned time and hard work.
That's kind of the theme of the SXSW Create Pavilion – everyday people tinkering and creating some pretty sophisticated things.
A product of the Central Texas Droids R2D2 Builders Club does just about everything R2d2 does in the movies, minus flying.
“Anything with robotics or people with engineering skills or woodworking or metal fabrication we all come together for our favorite movie, which is ‘Star Wars,’” says Jason Davis of Central Texas Droids. “Whatever gadgets he has, we try to replicate when we do our builds.”
A drummer droid was created out of necessity by members of the band Ponytrap, who say they couldn't find a drummer, so they just made one.
“My degree’s in music so I’m not an engineer at all,” says Quentin Thomas-Oliver of Ponytrap. “So it’s all written in notation and then we created software to take that notation and turn it into instructions for the machine.”
And finally, PopUpPlay castles might be the ultimate compromise for kids who always want to be on mobile devices and parents who want to get them off and out into the real world.
Kids design their own castle, spaceship, whatever on the PopUpPlay app and in a week, a full sized cardboard version of it arrives at their door.
“The kids actually get to choose the structural components,” says Amelia Cosgrove of PopUpPlay. “They choose doors, windows, towers. If they want one tower, three towers, they can do all of that. And then they get to fully customize all the graphics that go on it."
PopUpPlay, which incidentally won the SXSW Accelerator contest, charges a flat fee of $100 per creation.