Hack it Up

So today on TV I saw a commercial for the Wowee Spy-Kee robot. I had heard of it before, and it is finally out. Basically it is a treaded robot in tank mode that can be controlled over the internet and also has built in camera and speaker that can be accessed from over the internet. This is awesome. Wowee makes all kinds of awesome stuff to hack, from the Alive Chimp (basically a fully articulate animatronic humanoid head) to this. In fact, evosapien.org is a site entirely devoted to hacking all things Wowee. As soon as I heard about it, I had ideas of things to modify it with. When you take it out of the box, it is already awesome. The only thing that it is missing is a screen so the people looking at the robot can see who is controlling it. It could also be used to display stats or a prerecorded message or something. So I imagined sticking a Pico ITX on there. The power supply would be run off of a couple lithium batteries from camcorders and then would go through the tiny power supply they make into the Pico ITX motherboard. From there, I would stick an acessories board with the outputs for 7.1 audio, usb, mic, etc. With a gig of ram and a 32 gig SD card for the hard drive. You could put either linux or maybe a stripped down version of XP. Now, I haven't seen the board for the Spykee, but I am hoping that they were nice enough to label it and that there will be a set of pins that is directly coming from the wireless module. From there, I could piggyback the connection and give my ITX internet. A remote connection to it would let me play sound form added speakers (or I could splice them in to the existing speakers) or whatever. Now the whole reason I would put the ITX in there would be so that I could put like a 5in TFT screen on the front of the bot. I would power that from a battery pack also (just put them on the back of the screen). Then Skype on the ITX would let me show my face on the front, or I could put other stuff on there. But what if there is no wireless network or if they are all encrypted? In that case, a phone with an unlimited data plan hooked into the ITX would create a permenant network bubble around the bot. I would reverse the network port on the ITX and stick in a Fon router. It is called the Spykee robot, so I could also use the Fon router for blackhat purposes and make it live up to its name (and then access hashes or other encryption problems from afar and send it to the cluster for cracking).

The basis of the robot is basically a bunch of really cool electronics that would normally be expensive and several motors and a camera and speakers. That means that the shell that the bot comes with (which is cool) could be replaced with anything (vex anyone?). So for $250, thats pretty awesome. However, I think I will wait for it to come down in price or see if I can get one on the cheap from ebay or amazon or something. Instead, this Christmas I will be setting my sights on an Asus Aspire One. Tiny laptops are tasty (and good for testing...stuff...).

I just realized that I made a mistake. Wowee doesn't make the Spykee, Erector does. But I'm not going back to change all that. But Wowee deginatly make some awesome stuff for hacking. If you know me and want to some over to hack some stuff, shoot me an email and we will make it happen.

More on the Asus Aspire One later.