It’s time for the weekly robot roundup. So what have we been doing this week over at Botropolis? Keeping our eyes on all of the usual robot slaves, of course. It’s only a matter of time until they themselves become our masters and have us fetching beers and opening doors. We will be their meat-machines. When we break down, they will surgically repair us with parts from other humans, even allowing us to cheat death, until we become Zombies. At which point we will inherit the Earth once again, this time moaning and groaning and suffering their head-shots. Ain’t life awesome?

Robovie’s version of Mario saving the Princess.

Terminator head in a box.

Papercraft robots.

We don’t know why this guy needs a papercraft Wall E on his desk to let him know when he gets an email, but we approve wholeheartedly. This papercrafted “Mail E” is actuated by three 9g mini-servos and controlled by a SD21 servo driver and a picaxe 18x.

The head and hand move to alert you and if he can add wireless connectivity, he’ll let it move of the desk and have Wall E make certain gestures to mimic the kind of email that he has received. Pretty cool. Check out a video below.

Another week has come and gone. As usual, we’ve been keeping tabs on all things robot over at Botropolis. We haven’t had any reports of muscle-bound freaks appearing naked in the street and asking after John Connor, but hell, it’s only 2009. Still, we’re keeping our eyes peeled and we are your first line of defense. When they do strike, we will be ready with up to the minute updates. Here’s some of what we covered this week.

Magic: Octavia the robot gets fooled.

RoboFlush: For the extremely lazy.

T-Shirt: Robots In Disguise.

Fall Out Boy: New Robot Comic Books.

Here at the ‘Brick we love retro game consoles almost as much as we love shiny gadgets. Combine vintage game consoles with papercraft and it’s geek overload. If we could, we would make sweet love to these awesome looking paper consoles, but alas, even with protection, it’s sure to lead to sensitive paper cuts that we dare not speak of. So we’ll settle for just admiring these babies from afar. Until we have time to make some that is.

Load these things in your color printer and fold up a vintage Atari 2600 to sit on your desk. Goes well with your HAL 9000. These patterns by Marshall Alexander feature 3D pop-outs and nice details that will get you feeling all geeky and nostalgic for crap graphics.

It’s about time HAL had feet, but it may not be the smartest thing to give this unbalanced bot that much mobility. Sure, he’s cute and made of paper, but make no mistake, he still would prefer humans dead. This time it won’t be by shutting off cryogenic chambers and watching humans drift off into space. This time, he’ll use cuteness to get you close and paper cuts to finish you off. If you choose to print and assemble this papercraft version, there will be blood.

These paper toys are cute and they aren’t afraid to do battle with paper villains. But paper cuts can be deadly to them. You can download them at harlancore for free, print them out and start folding one. After that, just play with them on your desk. There’s Spiderman, Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X. And they are all sticking their tongues out at you. There are more characters available as well, like Storm, Beast etc. Nerd toys don’t get much cuter.

Papercraft is all the rage and we’ve seen some pretty cool stuff built into paper versions. This may be one of the coolest things yet. Imagine if you will an army of paper Stormtroopers. That’s scary. Now imagine an army of just their heads. That’s a dark-side nightmare. And it will surely happen when people realize that they can make their own.

You have to download .PDO papercraft files and a papercraft program called Pepakura Designer in to view them. Looks like they are in iPod Nano colors. You can download them here. Just make a bunch in different colors and decorate your room or something.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away…someone used the Death Star plans to build a paper droid and messed up the whole rebel plan. And so can you, if you have an ink jet printer, some scissors and glue.

It’s pretty accurate for paper, looks pretty awesome, plus it’s articulated. And if you really want to prove your paper droid making skills, you can use vector-based PDF plans to print and build your own life-sized R2 unit, but don’t let the Empire get a hold of the plans.

We told you about the tiny Nintendo DS back in February. If that didn’t combine paper and Nintendo to your satisfaction, then how about making your own tiny Super Nintendo?

This Super Nintendo can fit in the palm of your hand so it is very portable. It was created by Chilean papercrafter ryo007, and the tiny SNES even includes a pair of even smaller controllers AND a set of game cartridges. If you want to try your hand at making one, ryo has provided the cut-out diagrams on DeviantArt. Excellent work. I like that one of the cartridges is Super Mario All-Stars.