Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home 151
Orome1 writes "Worried about burglars ransacking your house? Buy yourself some toy robots! It is what Robert Oschler, a Florida-based programmer, did. He bought a Rovio — a Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam robot that can be picked up from toy sections of many stores — and modified it to suit his needs. The robot already has a camera, a microphone and speakers, but the improvements he made to the software allowed him to enhance the audio and video quality of this existing equipment, and to create specific routines for the robots. This way, every time he feels the need to check what's going on in the house, he simply goes online with his laptop and directs the robot through the house."
If you need to log in and watch... (Score:3, Informative)
then these machines aren't guarding your home. Get an alarm system.
That said, I owned a Rovio for a few weeks last year. I bought it as an xmas present to myself and found it lacking. I thought it would be cute to watch the dog from work but the CMOS webcam on it just required too much light to be usable. Even under well-lit conditions the compressed video was of marginal quality. I also wanted to use voice chat feature, which is IE only btw, but that didn't work out well either. The audio was either horrible or badly delayed. Not was there a "listen" button. It simply decided to broadcast audio when it decided to (whenever sound hit a threshold). It also had a low battery life and failed to dock often. Luckily, Amazon accepted my return and I got my money back.
Its a neat device and cheap for a telepresence robot, but not that great. I'd love to see a v2 of this, especially if it was easily hackable.
Re:Useless (Score:1, Informative)
This could help on the full-time job part: http://vitamindinc.com/
Re:iPhone Support (Score:3, Informative)
Problems are:
1. It is very difficult to fly through the camera - when you're not actually looking at it.
2. You need to be near it - Meaning the Parrot becomes a WiFi access point that your phone has to connect to. i.e. You cant fly it over the open 'net.
3. There is no type of "docking" - or "auto docking" - so you need to be there to physically turn it off, plug it back into the charger, etc.
The Parrot would be cool if it was more like the Rovio - and visa-versa!
Re:Beowulf (Score:3, Informative)
Heh. For those of you that don't know, he is referencing "Runaway," a terrible sci-fi movie starring Kirstie Alley, Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons. One of Michael Crichton's worst stories...the idea is that in the future, people use robots for everything. But the robots constantly screw up, in horrible and unintentionally hilarious ways. Like the robot that cooks your spaghetti has a gun built into it for some reason, and somehow its programming gets confused and it shoots you dead.
Also, they have 'robot drivers' for cars, but instead of being just a computer built into the car, they use mechanical mannequins that actually manipulate the steering wheel, gas, brakes, etc. MST3k-quality dreck.
Re:More useful... (Score:3, Informative)
And I'm sure you'd have better luck with multiple cameras: Of the 89 reviews, 35 gave it 1 out of 5 stars. [amazon.com] That's a very poor score, who would buy something where nearly half the reviews are 1 out of 5 stars?
And the complaints aren't just "I can't set it up". Many of the complaints are Battery only has a 10 minute charge, no customer service, [amazon.com] Broke after 2 months, no customer service. [amazon.com]
One customer even managed to fix his using internet instructions after WowWee said it was broken forever: [amazon.com] " I followed the recovery steps outlined in the link, and ended up with a functioning Rovio. This was after several emails with WowWee where they ended up saying "sorry, there is no way to recover from this problem". Basically "too bad"; no warranty because I had owned it for more than 180 days.
Obviously the biggest problem isn't setup or software, it's poor relibility added with poor customer service.
Nice thing about Rovio... (Score:4, Informative)
If you can do any type of programming that hits URLS, you can program the Rovio... it's whole interface is HTTP Puts and Gets with custom URLs, and it's well documented. After Wowwee released some of the advanced documentation, someone published the commands to brighten the camera within a week, solving a problem of way-too-dark video that had existed since the beginning. With this level of control, throwing together an interface you can operate from your cell-phone becomes very plausible... no laptop needed.
The person the article is about is actually the author of RoboDance, which is a complex application that controls a bunch of robots, with an emphasis on the infrared controlled kinds like RoboSapien. His next version of RoboDance is the one that will include Rovio control and probably all the capabilities described in the article.
I've been really impressed with the Rovio... my only complaint is that the battery life is pretty weak, right out of the box.