MakerFaire Rome 2025: BotRoyale, iFab, and more!

17-19th October 2025

Last year we were at the Maker Faire Rome 2025 with the FabLab! I’m a bit late as usual.

Once again iFab, the robot assistant for our FabLab, was there, stealing the show. People that worked on the project were there at the stand with us. There were other robots similar to iFab in the same stand, but I think he was the best of them all. I may be a bit biases though, who am I to tell?

We also had gadgets and stickers and stuff! All very nice, and it was the first time I did something like it.

But the main attraction for me was BotRoyale, a game Davide and I put together in a single weekend using our very little robots.

BotRoyale

BotRoyale is a capture-the-flag game. Four robots play in total, one starts from the center and has the flag (the runner), the others start from the corners and try to catch it (the hunters).

   

On the original PCBs I put two LEDs with associated resistors to use for status indication and the like. One of the robots was then modified to replace one LED with a reed switch that shorts to ground and the integrated pull-up resistor. The switch is held in a little “backpack” on the runner’s back. We then added what we call a “hat” to the hunters, that holds a magnet and gives them a very nice face :)

We initially didn’t want to modify the robots too much, and in fact one of the LEDs got destroyed during desoldering, as usual with SMD LEDs. Our initially idea was to simply add an infrared LED in parallel to the actual one, then put an infrared receiver somewhere on the field, maybe up high. The problem is that simple IR receivers receive practically anything, and require apposite circuitry to filter out things such as solar radiation. The only other receivers we are available were taken from TV remotes, and these are made to recognize a particular NEC code, which is hard to encode manually.

Software side the modifications were pretty easy. Since the robots are all connected to the base station via UDP, the runner just sends a packet when the switch is activated and the base station receives it, stopping the game.

As a field, we used a coffee table we had at the Fablab, modified with a couple of 3D printed pieces to hold the base station on the underside, and to pass string to limit the field.

I don’t have many photos of the event, we were mostly bound to our stand by a continuous stream of people that stopped to play our game. We calculated that at least 200 people stopped at our stand. Some also stopped and asked about the technical side and for the files of our robots.

   

After three days of faire, there’s a couple notes I can make on our robots. The two halves of the robot are held together with a single screw in the back, which causes the front to lift up a little bit. This is further accentuated by the fact that we had to fit the external antenna in the chassis last minute. My bad on that. The batteries last a couple of hours, but are hard to change because of the aforementioned problems. By the end of it we were quite good at changing batteries very fast. Luckily we had enough robots to keep half of them charging while the other half was being used. The only exception was the runner, which we only had one of. The rest of the stuff I would change I already described when I talked about the robots.

 

Other stuff

Partners

We shared the stand with our partners from Soldr and Microbots. Microbots’ products and our boards share a lot, as I discussed at length in the dedicated post. I also really enjoyed Soldr’s product, which is a portable soldering station. We actually used their stuff quite a lot to fix our robots during the faire.

Rome Half-Marathon

Like, who the hell organizes the Rome Half-Marathon the same day as the MakerFaire Rome, in the same place. Important streets were closed and we had to park quite far away and cover the rest by foot. Except that for the way we were coming from, we encountered a literal river of people running, which blocked the way. We waited at least 15 minutes for people to stop, with no end in sight. They seemed like an actual river, it was quite unbelievable to witness Luckily I run myself and the current people were running at my usual pace, so we started running along and gradually moving laterally to cross the street. We arrived late at our stand, but luckily the marathon finished by the time the public entered.

My favorite stands

There were two stands I really loved, apart from ours of course ;) .

The first was actually of a friend of Davide, Massimiliano Aiazzi, which has been building huge wooden pinball machines for year, mostly by hand. This year he expanded it to be played by seven players together. When all of them reach the center, a huge dragon raises and starts flapping its wings. After all, the stand was called "Il volo del drago", or “The Dragon’s Flight”.

 

He was alone on Sunday when he was dismantling everything, so me, Davide and another maker from a nearby stand helped him load his truck.

 

The other was a French guy who built different computers on breadboards. I don’t remember his name, but he goes by Fuzzy_Function on on Reddit and on Youtube. We nerded out on architectures, machine languages and stuff for a good quarter hour.