We couldn’t make Roboexotica in Vienna, Austria this year (check out last year’s coverage), so we asked [Bre Pettis] to act as our liaison.

Last night was the opening party of Roboexotica, the worldwide gathering of cocktail robots. It was a blast! Pictured above is Robovox, a 40 foot high robot that you can text message to and it will say what you text to it!

I was running my robot arms as a competition, armatron style, to get cherries into a shot glass.

The Reprap that Marius, Philipp, and the gang over at Metalab made last year that failed was revived and cranked out shot glasses all night!

Here are my photos. More photos tagged Roboexotica are coming in all the time, stay tuned!

[Deviant Ollam], lockpicker and beverage cooling contest host, was recently in Vienna, presumably for DeepSec. While there, he stopped by the Metalab hackerspace and checked out their RepRap rapid prototyping machine. You can see video of his visit above. He had them construct a custom fitted cover for the flash of his point and shoot camera. That’s what we love about rapid prototyping. Many of the projects we cover here solve a particular problem, but would never be considered commercially viable enough to put into production. With the availability of rapid prototyping increasing, hackers can start moving toward producing even more complex objects specific to their needs with a finish closer to commercial products.