I recently bought a Wowwee Rovio robot from Woot at a significant discount. Woot is notorious for selling “too good to be true” gadgets, and although this robot seemed to be an exception, recent events may indicate otherwise. (If you’ve heard me talk about the Rovio, you’ll still want to read this – it gets more interesting.)
I’ve bought many things from Woot over the years. Many things are interesting trinkets. A good majority of items are junk. The portable TV-in-a-pair-of-glasses? Junk. The Tom Tom GPS? DOA. So I was expecting similar from the Rovio.
The Rovio box was riddled with stickers covering up printed-on-box functionality with either no text (in an attempt to erase features that they didn’t want to advertise any more) or replacement text indicating changed functionality. Of particular concern was the sticker indicating something like “Your router does support WEP. You must enable WEP for the Rovio to work. All hail WEP!” Of course, WEP is less secure than my router’s default WPA2 encryption, and I was sad that I might have to reject the robot for fear of it causing insecurity in my home network.
Even inside the box, I was greeted by a yellow slip saying “Do not install from the included CD. Please download the latest software from wowweesupport.com.” It was looking bad, but things eventually improved, I think.
I set up the robot in its charging station according to the quickstart instructions, and set about reading the detailed software installation instructions, looking for some hint at this WEP requirement. It is perhaps a tangential story, but no more than 45 seconds into my reading the instructions, Phobos was chewing on one of the robot’s hard foam tires. Perhaps this scarred the robot somehow, and incited its revenge. Who knows?
After downloading the software to my notebook (it would not run on my desktop with Vista for some reason), and uploading new firmware to the robot, I was able to successfully control the robot from any computer. It was pretty slick. You get some controls that operate the robot - move it forward, turn, raise the camera, etc. - and the robot sends a video signal back over wifi to your computer. In all, a decent setup for what it does.
There are some advanced features like plotting paths that your Rovio can follow in advance, but I didn’t set up any of that because the battery kept running out very quickly. I don’t know if that’s because the battery life is awful or I just didn’t let it charge enough. I think I might have gotten three minutes of operation at most out of any charge I gave it. I thought I’d let it charge over night and see what kind of operation I got in the morning, but it seems that the Rovio had other plans.
When I returned from an outing last night, Berta asked me if I was playing with the robot remotely. I said “no”. She got a concerned look.
“The robot was moving all over the place. The kids were excited because the robot was moving, and we all assumed that you were controlling it while you were out.”
“Um, no, " I said.
“Well that’s freaky. It even rolled back over to the charger when it was done.”
I had seen the robot go into little pre-recorded fits if it had buffered commands prior to the battery dieing, which would be usually only enough to jostle it out of the charging base and a few feed across the floor. This seemed more likely than someone finding the public Rovio port and hacking the password protecting the controller interface. Still, concerned, I asked, “Was the camera arm moving up and down?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “But it was wheeling all over the place. The kids were really into it. Now I’m kind of freaked out.”
Perhaps afraid to venture downstairs, we left it alone until morning.
Today, I inspected the robot. The battery had obviously died, since the camera arm had not returned to its default position, and was pointing straight up. The robot was only inches from the recharging contacts. I nudged the robot onto to the charger with my foot, and the blue lights around its rim lit up, indicating a charge contact. It continued to sit, idle.
I’m not sure what was going on last night. The robot has not yet twitched this morning, but I’m almost anxious for it to start moving around of its own volition. Hopefully, I can capture the IP address of whoever is controlling it before it causes a mortal “accident” to befall me. Or maybe it has simply evolved intelligence, and I’m doomed outright.
