Well, I put together my Spykee last night. First impressions?

Well, since I'm a little old to have green glowing toys racing around, I skipped all the arm, fibre optics, etc. The motorised WiFi base is ready to go out of the box, and if it wasn't for the need to mount the camera somewhere, I would have skipped it entirely. As it is, I'm likely going to rearrange the pieces to raise the camera a little and give it a fixed mount - it keeps slipping on its gimbal at the moment.

The Meccano fixings don't appear to be that strong - the head/camera mount particularly has one short screw holding the webcam cable in position, and it keeps detaching. Others have popped out a little easily without much pressure.

Configuration has been a nightmare - longer than assembly. I'm impressed the unit effectively is a complete WiFi Access Point - it seems to be broadcasting even when the Spykee itself is connected to a WiFi AP, so it seems to be a complete self-contained system. The first time I set it up, I configured my home WLAN as the primary connection, and then closed the client - and from that point, I couldn't connect to Spykee at all. In the end a hard reset was required.

Also - I can't connect to it at all from my work laptop - checking the WiFi traffic, I see it attempts to connect to the Skypee using UDP broadcast, but Etherreal says the UDP packets are too short (4 bytes rather than min 20 bytes). I suspect for this reason, firewalls on my laptop are blocking either the outbound, or return, communication. Running the config program on another laptop without firewalls had no problems at all, and the robot appeared a second after the Connection dialogue opened.

Anyway, after eventually gaining control of it, I sent it for a run. It lasted around 4m, before the webcam picture flicked and died, I lost all control and connectivity, and the robot started juddering in a slow left circle. This appears to be an unhandled low battery condition. I returned it to the charging base for another hour, and next time round, it handled better.

Actually driving... the arrow key control works fine, and webcam and driving responsiveness is fine - really usable. I drove it up to my bedroom door, which was ajar, and it was strong enough to push the door open. It makes a fair racket - as loud as any remote-controlled car - and it also tipped up on the first obstacle it hit, and spend the rest of the time running around on it's back (which it also does OK).

And that's as far as I've got. I haven't managed to control it via the internet yet - it was complaining my password (around 20 characters) was invalid, even though I had registered it successfully online - so I suspect I need to use a shorter or simpler password. Once I get that working, then it'll do for me, for now - able to drive it around the flat and take a look.

Camera quality is grainy but OK; speed is fine.

The self-docking is terribly messy - I can see it failing much of the time, because the docking procedure seems to be fairly dumb, and the dock is so light that the Spykee easily knocks it out of alignment (they recommend velcroing it to the floor, with it's back against a wall, but even that could be knocked out of place with Spykee's strength).

It's a badly designed, problematic toy; Rovio is certainly a more complete product. However, with some firmware refinement, tweaks, opening up the source, and some playing with Meccano pieces to build a more stable body, I think it could be pretty serviceable. I'm keeping mine for now...

rnlg wrote I have to agree with everything you've said.  Here are my initial observations: the sound is poor; the speaker is OK, but the microphone causes bad feedback issues, even when connected over the Internet to a silent house, with the remote laptop mic muted.  Can't imagine having an actual conversation over it local control is fine, but over the Internet a single tap of an arrow key can result in the robot turning anything from 5 to 180 degrees

I'd better try this - my main reason for buying it was remote presence, and if it's uncontrollable and unusable remotely, then... umm...

Again, hopefully it's something Meccano can fix with firmware releases... at the moment, Spykee just continues any action until it receives something to the contrary - so if you lose comms mid-drive, it'll just go off by itself.

battery life seems less than impressive, although this might have been something to do with my son using it until it was dead, without having charged it up.  We only get a few minutes use before it needs charging again (and charging seems hit and miss, it doesn't seem to know how much charge the battery really has)

Again, I hope it's something that stabilises with time - would hate it to only last a few minutes

Having said all that, it is a nice toy (the wi-fi well (ish)), just poorly executed in some areas (construction, microphone, serviceability).  Having used Lego Mindstorms a fair bit over the past few years, I think the lack of extensibility (add on sensors, motors, programable interface) is the biggest dissappointment. I'd prefer Mindstorms with Wi-Fi!

Absolutely! I'm amazed Lego haven't come up with this as a module, considering the number of Lego-based robotic experiments out there where WiFi control is the only thing missing.

D

i have to agree with you about the light.. maybe this could be used to activate some sort of hack instead or even swap it out for a brighter LED. I havent had much time to take a closer look yet. As for charging its worth saying that it ONLY charges when turned ON. I have also noticed that sometimes when docking it, it says FULL rather than CHARGING so if it said full I just re docked it. I dont have a problem with the wifi connection here seems spot on and I even remote accessed my works PC, loaded the software on there and controlled it via remote / remote and it didnt seem bad at all.

I think my first mod will be to enable some way or moving the head (camera) up and down. theres a mod already about which uses the two fiber lights which looks half decent.

Steve