Fabby the FabLab Robot

The Brief

Culture Night brings open-door events to studios, labs, and venues across Ireland — a single evening where spaces that are normally closed invite the public in. FabLab Limerick asked Bubaki to create something that would engage visitors of all ages, make the FabLab's capabilities visible, and be robust enough to run continuously for a full evening of heavy public use.

The result was Fabby: a life-sized robot sculpture whose body was both the backdrop and the game.

The Game Mechanic

The mechanic is immediately legible, even to people who've never played it before: a screwdriver hangs suspended by a series of ropes and pulleys. A slot on Fabby's body waits to receive it. Players work the pulley handles to swing the screwdriver through space and drop it precisely into the slot — simple in concept, surprisingly physical and awkward in practice.

An embedded countdown timer added urgency. Completing the slot triggered a light and sound reaction from Fabby — LEDs, a tone, a small celebration — before the clock reset for the next player. The queue didn't empty all night.

Fabrication

Fabby's structure was designed and built in-house across the full range of FabLab tools — an intentional choice for a FabLab open night. The robot's body panels were CNC-routed from plywood. The frame was welded steel. Surface finishing was a mix of spray paint, screen-printed panel graphics, and hand-applied details. The result was large-scale and visually striking — readable from across the room.

Build Breakdown

• Structural frame: welded steel, designed for repeated physical loading
• Body panels: CNC-routed plywood, painted and finished
• Pulley and rope system: mechanical, requiring no electronics — failure-proof for the game mechanism itself
• Electronics: microcontroller-driven timer display, slot detection sensor, LED array, audio trigger
• Custom countdown display mounted on Fabby's chest

Why It Worked

The piece used analogue mechanics for the core game and electronics only where they added something the mechanics couldn't — time pressure and reward feedback. The rope-and-pulley system required no calibration, couldn't be hacked by a child, and produced consistent physical resistance throughout the evening. It didn't break. It ran all night. And because the mechanic is purely physical, it scaled across ages: a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old found the same challenge.

Fabby is a good example of what the studio does best when working at the intersection of making and electronics: the fabricated object isn't decoration for the technology. They're one system.