I love robots. Quite a few years ago, Ellyn bought me an R2-D2 robot that blew me away with it’s autonomous operation. It has IR and microphone sensors and does a pretty decent job of navigating around on it’s own. This year, Ellyn did it again with the WowWee Rovio webcam. This one doesn’t do anything on it’s own but it is pretty awesome. Rovio attaches to your local wifi network (WPA/WPA2 is supported in the latest production code). First I will say you must go get the latest BETA firmware before you try to do much with it. The beta code is located in the developer connection website found by browsing www.myrovio.com. I’m not going into detail about all the reasons why, suffice it to say it made this robot much more useable.
I will say brightness is an issue but since the new beta firmware uses VLC, you can adjust it better. The snapshot function works great. The image here is pretty dark because all the lights are out except the Christmas tree… and rovio emailed this shot to me and I posted it here. Additionally, you can pull up the rovio stream address with VLC on your local network and stream it, applying whatever post processing you like.
The controlling web interface is great, and it is trivial to get access to it from the Internet. It makes for fun and interesting situations… I’m using mine right now to watch and make sure Amrin doesn’t get up.
Thanks Ellyn, you satiated my Geekness once again.
NRJiiD on 25 May 2010 at 7:16 am #
Your geekiness can never be satiated. Only pacified. On the short term. ;0)