Want to take reusing, reducing and recycling to the next level? How about transforming your old audio cassette player into a robot?

The Reuseum in Garden City is putting on a workshop to teach the fundamentals of hand soldering, electrical circuits and how to repurpose common, everyday items, such as old cell phones, CD, DVD and cassette players, instead of sending them to the landfill.

"Families can come to the workshop and bring in a CD player or old tape player and use some of the parts from it," said David Gapen, operations partner and chief tech geek for The Reuseum. "We'll put them together on this new circuit that I designed, and it will react to it."

The result is a biology, electronics, aesthetics, mechanics (BEAM) robot. But just call it a BEAMbot. It's a minimalist and resource-efficient approach to robotics.

"BEAM robots are the do-it-yourself form of robotics that revolve around using recyclable parts of electronics," Gapen said. "You're putting it together in a new form of fun and creativity, and you learn some science and art."

The Reuseum is an engineering and industrial surplus supply store with an array of old-school, obscure and oddball technology. Through The Reuseum, Gapen hopes to make the most of technology by redeploying or repurposing it instead of tossing it on the scrap heap.

"It's not just about putting it in the trash can when you're done with it. It's about repurposing the components before you even get to the recycling stage," Gapen said. "That's where our sustainable lessons come through. When stuff starts filling up landfills and bottlenecking what recycling we already have. We want to give it another life in another form; a baby step to delay what will be inevitable."

The BEAMbot workshop will offer a hands-on opportunity to take part in this process.

"It's not an exhibit, it's a workshop," Gapen said. "These are really, really simple machines. But it's really cool when kids who already have wild imaginations É see something this far out with their own eyes."

Kids are encouraged to attend with their parents, who may be intrigued by the chance to build a robot.

"We're going to be working with hot glue guns and soldering irons. But with a parent, anyone as young as 8 can do this. Sometimes an 8-year-old can do it way better than a 25-year-old guy like me can," Gapen said.

But don't let yourself stop there. The Reuseum is holding a Boise Bot Competition on Sept. 12 to highlight and challenge the talent and ingenuity of creative hobbyists, students and geeks through a tournament in which the robots they design and build will compete.

"We want to put out a public challenge to engineers, the Boise robotics group - we're the amateurs. We're the dudes that hang out at the thrift store," Gapen said.

"It's not just a creative thing, it's a constructive thing," he added. "I'm having a blast."

Brenda Gutierrez: 377-6440