Slashdot Mirror
Sony Aibo Hacks Increase Functionality
Dinglenuts writes "Engadget posted a how-to article on increasing your Aibo's functionality using third party hacks. Given the increasing availability of networked home goods, I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
The opportunity for clever hacks like these through the combination of devices is why things should be left open by their designers during conception, when it's all possible. If this kind of mindset was more widespread, there'd be all kinds of possibilities from discovering what the pure functionality of a device can do. The increasing trend to lock devices down and restrict consumer flexibility with products they choose to purchase (see Xbox boot rom checks etc) is something that's dissapointing, and closing doors on innovative and new uses for everyday devices.
Business Voyeur
This reminds me of the continuously hacked/upgraded robot cat, Aineko, in Charles Stross' science fiction novel Accelerando (available for free download).
It will be interesting to see how complex these customized Aibo become in the next 10-20 years.
You know, Sony is supporting development of new software for the AIBO (*) You can create new personalities using high level tools like R-Code, or download their software development kit (for free!) and code in C++. It's an impressive piece of hardware.
If you're interested in the low level processing, which allows direct processing of the camera images, networking support, real-time control of joints, etc., then of course I'm going to recommend the software framework I'm currently working on: Tekkotsu. However, there are number of other options available as well. (see my prior post)
Anyway, we'd always like to have more developers -- help show Sony there are advantages to opening their source code!
(* or at least now they are, originally they didn't like the idea so much, but they seem to have gotten over it somewhat -- hardware is still tightly locked down, but the software interface is pretty available)