I joined AWS in late 2012 on a team that owned several low-level infrastructure services. In all my time there it was the most difficult team I’d been on, pager PTSD, brutal ops load, and a bunch of mission critical, but unrelated, services to learn. But that kind of crucible forges good friendships, and those have lasted long past my turn on that team. At the time, AWS held a monthly beer bust in the big conference room at the top of the Blackfoot building in downtown Seattle. Each month would be hosted by a different service team and would have a different theme chosen by that team.
We got about six months’ notice when our turn came up, and for once things were going well enough that we had some cycles to spare. Our manager, Mike, was a very positive and energetic guy who happened to love Star Wars, so that was selected for our party theme. I don’t remember exactly how the idea surfaced, but a few of us decided we needed to build an R2-themed, beer-dispensing robot for the party. Justin volunteered his garage for the build and started scrounging parts from thrift shops around town. The wooden milk powder barrel was one of the first pieces we found, and it’s what pushed us toward a steampunk R2 aesthetic. We were improvising with whatever we could scrounge, so we leaned into it. Dhan offered to help with the RC electronics and I pitched in where I could in other areas.
I found an old electric wheelchair on Craigslist with dead batteries and salvaged the 24v motors and wheels out of it. I also took some classes at a little private shop near Boeing Field and learned to MIG weld well enough to get by. I sourced and put together the CO2 system to serve the beer and built the head electronics that drove lights, R2 sounds, and head movements. That ran on an Arduino Uno with some C code, plus a couple of supporting boards for sound playback and I2C-programmable LEDs. I also helped with other parts of the build like refinishing the barrel and making various mounting fixtures. Everything above the motorized base could be removed for loading the keg (wrapped in ice blankets). The legs, for instance, were held on by bolts welded to cup-shaped candle holder bases. It took us roughly 200 hours over 3.5 months that summer of 2013 to build R2Beer2 1.0, and it was one of the more fun things I’ve built.
We had it ready for the party, but “ready” was doing a lot of work in that sentence. The pair of MDF plates mounting the head to the barrel tended to drag and prevent the head from rotating. The lead batteries were too large and heavy for the amount of energy we needed. Worse, mounting the motors directly to the aluminum relay rack base frame was causing the whole assembly to flex and deflect. The front wheel mounted on two thin strips of plate aluminum was also flexing and bending every time we changed directions. The whole thing weighed about 250 lbs loaded with a full keg. It was a lot. As if all that weren’t enough, the beer was coming out with way too much foam!
After a few events and a clear-eyed look at everything that was wrong with the gen1, I started work on a round of refinements. This included a total redo of how the motors and front wheel mounted to the frame. I picked up some scrap 1/4" steel plate from a metal vendor in south Seattle and did some precision (for my garage) work to mount the motors to this plate, which the frame then sat on. Same for the front wheel mount. My other big contribution was to redo the way the head mounted to the barrel body. I replaced the pair of MDF plates with a lightweight steel adjustable suspension mount that was easily fine-tuned for center and height and fixed all the drag issues. It also let me run power and signal wires up from the base, eliminating the separate batteries in the head that were a constant nuisance to swap. Most importantly, I fixed the foaming beer problem by adjusting the pressure down slightly and putting longer tubing between the keg and faucets.
While I worked on the structural and functional side, Justin focused on several aesthetic upgrades to the head. Leather patches and actual hand-hammered copper rivets, which required a delicate touch on the fiberglass. The results looked fantastic and much closer to the original look we were after.
The first appearance was October 2013 at the beer bust, followed by events in various buildings around Seattle for a while after. Having had my fun for three years on that team, I moved on around mid-2015 and transferred ownership of R2 to Mike, who continued to take it to events through at least 2019, including one stage visit at re:Invent. So what happened to it? When Mike moved on he took R2, which went through a bit of an identity crisis and emerged as BrewskiBot. Under that name it continued to make appearances (paid ones this time) at weddings and parties, though links to those events seem to have vanished from the internet. It appears R2 has now retired from the party circuit, getting a well-earned rest. It was never built to last, but it hung in there well and proved more resilient than I ever expected.
I had a roadmap of upgrades that never materialized: an insulated barrel with refrigeration, Wi-Fi for beyond-line-of-sight control, a badge reader with serving metrics and a dashboard, and automated internal awards for top consumers. At some point we decided that gamifying beer consumption was probably a bad idea for an office full of competitive developer types. Still, it was one of those projects where you learn something new every weekend (welding, CO2 systems, embedded electronics, fiberglass) and then get to wheel the thing into an office party. I got more out of it than I put in.