Your very own Wall-E? It may not be too futuristic a prospect if Intel has anything to do with it. The company just showed off a DIY kit at the Code Conference that will let you 3D-print your very own robot for $1600.


Have a 3D printer? Or at least access to one? You're pretty much halfway there. The at-home robot maker will be buyable online at 21stCenturyRobot.com later this year. It will include the designs for the hardware that you can make if you have a 3D printer you can use. It will also give you the moving parts you can't print, like motors and wires and processors and batteries. The cost is relatively low because Re/Code says it runs on Intel Edison—a cheap computer on a chip. If it were fitted with a better brain, like say an i5 processor, it would run more like $16,000.

Personal Robot | 21st Century Robot If you had a robot, what would it look like? What kind of jobs would it do for you? What would… Read more


And the robot is supposed to get better as people start to create and tinker with them—it's open-source, so developers can build programs and apps for it and 'bot builders can download them at will. Robots will be able to do things like translate languages, or deliver a beer, or get the mail. Anything! Your open source Intel-powered robot is your oyster. And for not that much money, relatively speaking. [Re/code]