Spykee is a robotic toy made by

Erector Erector Set (trademark styled as "ERECTOR") was a brand of metal toy construction sets which were originally patented by Alfred Carlton Gilbert and first sold by his company, the Mysto Manufacturing Company of New Haven, Connecticut in 1913. In ...

Meccano Meccano is a brand of model construction system created in 1898 by Frank Hornby in Liverpool, England. The system consists of reusable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles and gears, and plastic parts that are connected using nut ...

. It contains a

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webcam A webcam is a video camera which is designed to record or stream to a computer or computer network. They are primarily used in videotelephony, livestreaming and social media, and security. Webcams can be built-in computer hardware or peripheral ...

, microphone and speakers. Controlled by computer locally or over the internet, the owner can move the robot to various locations within range of the local router, take pictures and video, listen to surroundings with the on-board microphone and play sounds/music or various built-in recordings (Robot laugh, laser guns, etc.) through the speaker. Spykee has a WiFi connectivity to let him access the Internet using both ''ad hoc'' and infrastructure modes. The electronics inside Spykee were built by a French start-up calle
WaveStorm

Introduction

The Spykee robot was conceived in 2006 and began shipping in the United States in late 2008.

Assembly

Spykee is marketed for children ages 8 and up and claims to require 1.5 hours installation time. A review of Amazon.com product reviews indicates the actual assembly time is longer.

Modifications

Spykee is compatible with other Meccano set parts. At least one owner has modified Spykee to be able to move its "head" (and thus its webcam) up and down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN_9rkovW6s It is advertised as an open-source robot, although no

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

or SDK has been officially released. However, http://spykee.duskofsolace.com is an unofficial wiki containing information on how to access Linux on Spykee. There is information on how the hardware works and new unofficial firmware, that mainly addresses issues on accessing linux and has the capability of mounting network or USB partitions in linux. As of May 2010 (possibly earlier), the full source code for the robot firmware, as well as documentation, has been made available, see: http://www.spykeeworld.com/spykee/US/freeSoftware.html A home made robot daemon open source project (named Phobos Daemon) is available on spykeewiki as well. The aftermarket daemon supports all the basic functionality of Spykee and has additional features. As of October 2010, there exists an application to control Spykee from an Android Smartphone. http://www.aspykee.com . There is also a perl application to control Spykee from for example Linux. https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl .

References

Online review
on robotreviews.com
Online review
on tech.spotcoolstuff.com

External links

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Perl library
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