WonderFest returned to Louisville in May 2025, and the B9 builder presence at the show continued the pattern of recent years — a concentrated display of finished and in-progress robots alongside a broad representation of classic science fiction model and prop work.
The B9 Display
The B9 Builders Club display area brought together a range of builds representing different stages and approaches. Several fully operational robots with working electronics were present, giving convention attendees the experience of seeing the chest light patterns, hearing the original voice samples, and watching the torso rotation and bubble lift in operation simultaneously.
The variety of approaches on display is one of the most useful aspects of the in-person gathering — seeing three or four finished robots in proximity makes the dimensional decisions (dome proportions, collar height, tread section width) immediately legible in a way that photographs don’t fully convey.
Builder Community Highlights
Conversations on the show floor covered themes that come up consistently in the builder community:
Electronics integration has become more accessible in recent years. The availability of better microcontroller boards, affordable LED driver ICs, and compact Class D amplifiers means that a fully electronic B9 — lighting, sound, rotation, bubble lift, remote control — is a realistic goal for builders who weren’t doing serious electronics work five years ago. The B9 electronics guide reflects current practice rather than early-era approaches.
Reference resources continue to develop. The collective documentation of the original prop has reached a point where builders starting today have better reference material available than builders who started the same project ten or fifteen years ago. Community research threads in the B9 Builders Club forums represent decades of accumulated investigation.
Part availability remains a recurring topic. Community-run casting operations for specific components come and go depending on individual builder participation. The show floor is typically where these arrangements get discussed and organized — production runs of specific parts that an individual builder has taken on for community distribution.
First-Time Attendees
For anyone attending WonderFest for the first time, the experience diverges from general science fiction conventions in ways that aren’t obvious from the outside. The convention is organized around making rather than consuming — the display competition, the dealer room, and most of the floor conversations are between builders.
First-time attendees who are active builders — even early in a project — are welcomed into conversations in a way that passive fans are not. Bringing in-progress work, reference questions, or even just a clear description of where you are in a project produces substantive conversations with people who have solved the same problems.
For full context on what to expect and how to prepare, the WonderFest Louisville guide covers the convention in detail.
For the Record: 2005 by Comparison
For builders who have been in the community long enough to remember the 2005 show — covered in the WonderFest 2005 report — the contrast with current builds illustrates how much the community’s technical capability has advanced. Builds that would have been exceptional in 2005 are now a baseline. The floor level of finish quality, electronic integration, and dimensional accuracy has risen substantially across two decades of accumulated community knowledge.