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Keepon co-creator Marek Michalowski shows off his Arduino-powered wall drawing robot (video)
As one might imagine, there's plenty of shiny things to get excited about in BeatBots' San Francisco office, one of which is suspended on a wall in between paintings of Keepon and his power-promoting British cousin, Zingy. Marek Michalowski gave us a look at the still-unnamed wall drawing robot he's been fiddling around with. Still in its early stages, the 'bot is supported by wires that also power it, using an Arduino brain to drag a dry erase marker across the white surface of the wall. Check out a quick video explanation after the break.
BeatBots co-founder Marek Michalowski encourages the world to hack Keepon (video)
When we visited BeatBots' San Francisco headquarters a few days back, the company's co-founder Marek Michalowski was a bit hush-hush when it came to discussing the future of Keepon, not saying much beyond alluding to upcoming updates for the move-busting little 'bot. He was, however, more than happy to talk about hacking the beat-monitoring toy, something the company had in mind when it first designed the consumer-friendly toy. "We felt it was important to allow people to hack it and be able to do more things with the toy than it can do out of the box," Michalowski told us. The company left the toy's I2C bus open, so interested parties can easily manipulate My Keepon by way of microcontrollers like Arduino and its ilk. We've already seen some crafty individuals get the robot to do their bidding, something that's only likely to increase when Michalowski releases a guide for hacking My Keepon in the very near future. In the meantime, click through after the break to see the robotics PhD discuss Keepon hacks. A YouTube full of choreographed "Thriller" Keepon videos surely can't be that far off.
My Keepon drops by for a brief hands-on, we can't handle the cuteness (video)
See that little dude up there? That's My Keepon, and it should look familiar if you're a fan of Spoon or keeping up with autism and related human interaction research. It was just about four years ago when we glimpsed the original dancing research robot by BeatBots dubbed Keepon, and now the $50 toy version we'd been teased is finally set to make its debut this holiday season. Considering its Pro sibling costs nearly $30k, we were curious to see how well this version made by Wow! Stuff would keep the original's essence in tow. To find out, we spent some time with a pre-production unit and had Marek Michalowski, co-inventor of the robot, walk us through it. %Gallery-133464%
