After months in the planning, Saturday 1st August 2015, we were hosts to the first ever UK Inter HackSpace Robot Wars.

It’s been a pretty gruelling few months as not only did we organise the event though, we hosted it at our Hackspace venue, put on food and even built our own Robot to participate in the battles.

We had teams travel far and wide from rLab, Reading; Make:Bromyard, Herefordshire; Hitchin Hackspace, Hertfordshire and FizzPop, Birmingham.

It was touch and go whether some teams would enter, whether others would finish their bot, it was touch and go as to whether we would even finish our bot in time!

Fortunately, everyone pulled more than their weight and we’re delighted to say that it was an overwhelming success, with great feedback from everyone. It couldn’t have really gone any better for our first run.

Each team made a radio-controlled “robot” to compete at the event hosted at the Potteries Hackspace, near Stoke-on-Trent.

The ‘Robot Wars’ concept is well known from the discontinued TV series which inspired this event, with a twist, ours had a maximum weight of 10Kg.

The robots were therefore a bit smaller than the ones you may have become familiar with on TV, but that’s not to say they didn’t each carry their own unique qualities. They did.

The agenda of the day was purposely left pretty loose to allow for unforeseen circumstances such as last minute repairs or traffic delays, however we did have an outline of an itinerary that we aimed to stick to, which seemed to work quite well.

Our members were arriving from 9AM to get the space prepared ready for the other teams to arrive from 11AM. The first fight was set at 12-midday. There would be an hour of fighting, then we planned to break for lunch for about an hour, do some repairs and continue the fights until around 4PM.

We tried to keep to this itinerary, but we did stray off a little due to some emergency repairs and battery charging. Hopefully we’ll get this right next time.

The general feedback about the day was that it was very good. Our arena was on the small side at only 8 feet square, but we were working with the resources we had and the space we wanted to fit it into to leave enough room to manoeuvre around it. Naturally people have asked for a larger arena or smaller robots.

Safety was our number one priority and concern. We set pretty ridged rules as to what the robots could and couldn’t have. We also carried out risk assessments on each of the robots. The arena wall was re-enforced on the day which fortunately wasn’t necessary, however would need to be scaled up for larger events.

We wanted this, the first event of this kind to be fun for everyone rather than too competitive. Feedback has been mixed, with some suggesting they’d like it to be more competitive next time, to the death while others suggested it should be more like a show. A compromise of a double league was even suggested. It’s too early to tell.

Everyone said they loved the fun, inclusive and relaxed atmosphere as well as the BBQ food we put on. Everyone was really keen to do it all over again.

We’ve compiled a video of all the fights from the day which you’ll find on the YouTube video below:

You’ll also find some photos on the InterHackSpace Robot Wars 2015 Facebook page.

There’s a whole host of videos, photos and tweets out there surrounding the event, so if you’ve spotted one, please drop us a message or comment below and we’ll be happy to give it a mention.

The event couldn’t have really gone better on the day for us, so we’re calling that a resounding success and you’ll be pleased to know that we’re already in talks about the next one.

We loved hosting the event and would be happy to host it again next year. We’d also like to encourage other spaces to consider hosting the next one if they can. We’re also considering the possibility of holding an inter hackspace event at the bi-annual hackspace festive, EMF Camp 2016.

What do you think? Would you be interested in coming to the next one?