[Noisebridge-discuss] hacking Spykee robot

[Gian Pablo Villamil]

I recently picked up a Spykee robot, basically it's a WiFi
controllable robot with a webcam for a head.
(http://www.spykeeworld.com/spykee/US/index.html - annoying flash
site).

I've built it, it works, you can actually control it over the
Internet, but it has a lot more potential. The manufacturer was
supposed to release an Open Source SDK, but has dragged their feet on
it. It seems to be running some kind of embedded Linux, connecting to
the internal serial port seems to give access to the internal file
system.

The lack of the SDK hasn't prevented a bunch of people from hacking
it, by reverse engineering the control protocol, and doing clever
hacks like using the LEDs (which are user controllable) to trigger
additional motors instead:

http://www.spykeedev.net/
http://www.spykeemods.co.uk/
http://www.spykee.org/Default.aspx

I've successfully used the streaming webcam driver from SpyKee dev to
feed video into VJing app, amongst other things.

Anyone else want to play? It seems like quite a capable robotics
platform, shame the makers haven't seen fit to release the SDK.