Nicolas Pirotte

Born in 1979. I build my first robot when I was 8 years young with Lego blocks. It was about 35cm high and wasn't automated at all but had quit a number of articulations and little compartments to dock a space craft and a little bot. At age 12, I build a robot from scratch with a wired control panel. It was mounted on a Lego locomotive to move back and forth. It was made out of wood and plastic parts and all kind of recycled electronics such as a remote control with joysticks, multi-chime sound generator, walk-man for music and speech playback, some DC motors and incandescent lights... It was another time, one of analogue signals and a lot of wires. Then my puberty kicked in and I was more into building and connecting electronic music instruments, which I still do by the way. At age 21, as part of my bachelor degree in electronics I had to present a thesis in front of a jury. This time it was a more functional robot, one that could be implemented in bars to take orders and bring the ordered drinks. Don't laugh, this robot was mounted on two Lego locomotives but this time on maximum 256 elements of Lego rails. This bot remembers it's position on the track were someone placed an order by pressing buttons on the front panel. A display shows the amount to be paid, after insertion of the money the robot leaves to fetch the order. At the time, I programmed all instructions in assembler to be loaded on an Atmel micro-controller. I made all PCBs myself in the garage at my parents place. In 2009 I built our house and automated the most I could with custom soft & hardware from Crestron. I integrated alarms for smoke detection and burglars, it manages all alarm clocks in the bedrooms, heating systems, ventilation, blinds, music, lights, IR devices for switching channels and sources on amps, decoders and much more. Complete control of the house is made possible trough fixed touch screens and an app I programmed for all Apple devices. So here I am, getting back to my first love; robots. I would also like to share my knowledge and passion for robots with my 2 sons in a playful way and I believe Ezrobot is the way!