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I found my old Erector set over the holidays and brought it back with me. This evening, I used it to rebuild Fido. Fido is now significantly sturdier, more configurable, and has plenty of room for all the fancy sensors I just bought :) The pictures below also showcase my fancy new XO from G1G1. It's a lot snappier than my old B1.

Engadget OLPC XO and iRobot Create brought together for telepresence hack MAKE Roomba meets the XO-1 Gizmodo Hack Attack - XO Laptop Hacked to Remotely Run Roomba 'Round Rooms Ubergizmo XO laptop hacked Wired OLPC Telepresece Hack: One Robot Per Child Hackszine.com OLPC telepresence robot OLPC News Why OLPC's Give One Get One Will Sell Out Fast! Obviously I need to include a USB missile launcher just to appease the masses.

I've made a lot of progress on Fido recently. It now docks (by piggybacking on the built in iRobot docking algorithm), manages charging the OLPC, has multi-day up times, and, most recently, dynamic sparkline representations of the sensor data on the web interface. What could I possibly do now? Everyone I ask says 'surveillance.' Simple surveillance is boring though. So, I'm going to kick it up a notch. My goal is to automatically generate one of these for each room in my apartment. Then, beer.

I just compiled the flite text-to-speech engine and copied it to the OLPC. To get it working I had to: modprobe snd-pcm-oss After that, it worked like a champ. Highly recommended.

The winners for the Instructables competition have been posted. Free robot for me!

Albert suggested I call this project Fido. LGTM. I made a lot of progress on Fido this weekend. It now has an Arduino on board to control all sorts of fun things. Most importantly, it controls a working headlight (a fancy 100 lumen LED flashlight) and a relay to cut power between the OLPC and the Create. I made a custom end cap for the flashlight out of a PVC cap and some flexible black tubing that fits snuggly over the light so that I could hook it up to a transistor switch. I also committed many enhancements to PyRobot to support logging on the web UI, soft resets, and some bug fixes and error handling that improve robustness. For pictures, have a look at my Picasa Web album .