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Brookstone Rover 2.0 SpyTank Teardown

Posted by timothy on from the what's-inside dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Like the Roomba and other hackable consumer electronics, the Brookstone Rover 2.0 looks like a great value for hackers and robotics experimenters. Check out this teardown and another link within for lots of pics and info."

15 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Is this an ad... by vikingpower · · Score: 2

    ...or does TFA, just like the OP, only look that way ?

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    1. Re:Is this an ad... by Gaygirlie · · Score: 3, Funny

      It looks like one, it walks like one, and it quacks like one. But then again, I'm not an ornithologist.

    2. Re:Is this an ad... by Nyder · · Score: 4, Informative

      ...or does TFA, just like the OP, only look that way ?

      No, it is a breakdown, as in, tear apart to see whats inside it, from a separate website/company.

      This is a very common occurrence in the tech world. Some of us like to know whats inside before we buy.

      --
      Be seeing you...
  2. Creepy spying by DKlineburg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Forget hacking, Someone is going to disguise it as a common place object and spy where they shouldn't. . .

    --
    Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
    1. Re:Creepy spying by Gaygirlie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Forget hacking, Someone is going to disguise it as a common place object and spy where they shouldn't. . .

      There are much easier ways to go about that than buying one of these. I can think of atleast 12 different ways of hiding Linux-powered computers with networking and video capabilities in plain sight.

    2. Re:Creepy spying by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not to mention all those (not always linux based; but generally dangerously overqualified in one way or another) network connected devices with cameras and microphones that people lovingly carry around and carefully keep charged and in working order totally voluntarily...

  3. Not sure there's much to be gained from this by Viol8 · · Score: 3

    You can do pretty much what you want with the system as it stands so I'm not sure what's to be gained by taking it to pieces and reprogramming it. Sure its fun for a while seeing how it works, but this isn't a cheap device and if all you want is a general purpose controller running linux buy a raspberry pi. Why wreck an expensive bit of equipment to get the same result?

    1. Re:Not sure there's much to be gained from this by Nyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can do pretty much what you want with the system as it stands so I'm not sure what's to be gained by taking it to pieces and reprogramming it. Sure its fun for a while seeing how it works, but this isn't a cheap device and if all you want is a general purpose controller running linux buy a raspberry pi. Why wreck an expensive bit of equipment to get the same result?

      My Linksys WRT54LG router worked fine out of the box, but I still installed DD-WRT on it.

      Why? Because I could. Breakdowns are sweet. I didn't have to buy this toy/tool to see whats inside, and now that I know, I can make a more informed decision if I want to buy this device to hack, or to just run on it's own.

      Anyways, you miss the point of hacking stuff. It's about the fun, the challenge, the learning and sometimes it's about doing shit that no one else has done.

      --
      Be seeing you...
  4. Re:Prist Fost by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

    because what else is there that can be used for something like this anyway?

    Well, *BSD are popular on small, closed devices, partially because there is no need to release or maintain any changes to the software, ever.

  5. I'd urge anyone to look inside Roomba by Keruo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I really recommend anyone with roomba to take their screwdriver and open the thing.
    Once you do and compare the inner workings to the device linked in the article, you really start to understand the concept of product design.

    To recap the differences for those who don't own one:
    Roomba design shows massive modularity. Every component inside is relatively easy-to-swap module.
    It's very easy to fix if something breaks down when everything is attached with 2-3 screws max.
    Modules have fixed connectors which just slot in. You won't end up in situation like: "ooh, this 4-pin connector looks like that one, did I connect it right?"(see the pics linked - power connector and speaker for example)
    You could probably 3D print matching spare modules if you made drawings for one.

    Parts of the rover, like motors and gears are supposed to be modular, yet they don't really look like that to me, maybe I'm just misreading the images.
    To me, it looks like "Made in China" - medium cost build. There's some build quality, it's not made from the cheapest material available, but it's not for daily use. Well, it's supposed to be a toy..
    In the Rover, wifi and camera modules are most likely USB yet they use different cabling, why?
    For hackable toy, those should be replaceable easily. Roomba doesn't have USB for wifi or camera either, but then again, it's a vacuum cleaner!

    It’s one of those toys that is relegated to the closet shortly after its first set of batteries die.

    Something from the article I'd have to agree with.

    --
    There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
    1. Re:I'd urge anyone to look inside Roomba by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      Parts of the rover, like motors and gears are supposed to be modular, yet they don't really look like that to me, maybe I'm just misreading the images.

      To me, it looks like "Made in China" - medium cost build. There's some build quality, it's not made from the cheapest material available, but it's not for daily use. Well, it's supposed to be a toy..

      I suspect that it's a matter of Brookstone's style. They do a lot of relatively pricey and dubiously useful novelty gadgets(the sort of thing you end up with if you do your technology shopping from the 'Skymall' catalog...) That's the sort of business with enough churn in the product catalog that you'd bankrupt yourself doing a lot of fully-custom parts, so you'll see moderately mod-friendly levels of modularity, lots of space between parts unless mechanically necessary, connectors rather than ribbon cables or soldered components, and so on; but it also isn't one that allows you to specialize around a few core products that you relentlessly refine over several product generations for maximum elegance in mass production and service.

      Their price tags, and target market, likely keep them from going with the very nastiest build quality(the product manual, while no doubt uninformative, was probably in readable English, as well); but I wouldn't expect to find either beautifully refined elegance or impressive-but-deeply-DIY-unfriendly extreme miniaturization and integration in their stuff.

  6. Disappointed. by Celeritas+5k · · Score: 2

    The headline promised me a tank. No guns => not a tank.

  7. Linux is slow? by Like2Byte · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The system is probably running Linux. It takes a while to become ready after the power switch is turned on, which is typical of Linux. A smaller RTOS would likely come up much faster. The fact that the device requires networking, and streaming of sound and video also lends itself to a Linux system. Linux already includes much of the software to make everything work. The size of the RAM and Flash suggest a lean, but very workable Linux based system.

    Emphasis mine. Really? I've found my Linux installs to be very fast booting - certainly faster than Windows machines. Also, according to your pics there is an 80MHz crystal on there - any modern day OS you threw on that loaded from some external storage cluster would take a while to load. However, I didn't see any SD Card, SSDs or other external media device with which to hold a larger OS which means it's all embedded in one of those IC chips you couldn't find any information on.

    Having said that, there are version of Linux which can fit on a single floppy drive - about 1.2Megabytes - and in this case the OS has been burned into one of the ICs. Point here is that it may not even be Linux.

    1. Re:Linux is slow? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The S29GL032N on the main system board is a 4 megabyte Spansion flash chip. Not luxurious; but well within the realm of a router-sized embedded linux(though it neither implies nor excludes a bunch of embedded OS options).
       
      As for speed, Linux can be made to be quite snappy; but it wouldn't surprise me if enough of the lag is in starting up network-related stuff, along with whatever server program the device uses to allow the client to connect to it, that you wouldn't be able to readily distinguish between Linux, Vxworks, BSD or WinCE on speed alone: sure, an embedded OS booting from solid-state storage on known hardware should move like lighting; but then it has to bring up an external USB device, do the WPA dance, send a DHCP request and receive a reply, and then start up whatever server program the firmware guys threw together for the client to connect to. And then we don't actually know how often the client side of things actually polls the IP where it thinks the device is supposed to be, or whether the device sends out some sort of broadcast when it comes up, or what. Too many variables to even say how fast the OS comes up.

      What baffles me is that the author of TFA is apparently geek enough to take a screwdriver to a $150 toy; but is making dumb guesses about OS type based on boot time even though he found a populated serial header, with RX and TX labelled, no less... C'mon, man, you can be pretty sure that the thing is 3.3v(based on the flash IC and lack of visible level converters, might be 5v or 5v-tolerant, highly unlikely to be RS-232), the pins are labelled for you, and it'll probably boot-spew something at you, why are you guessing based on boot time?

  8. 3D printed industrial robot arm by Ceriel+Nosforit · · Score: 2

    I have yet to see a single 3D printed industrial robot arm anywhere. Actually it doesn't have to be printed, it just needs to meet user-picked mechanical requirements. You can calibrate software to compensate for your own inept assembly, which to me implies that simple hardware + advanced software = magic.

    My use would be attaching a router to it and letting it carve stuff out of for example wood. E.g. this chainsaw-bot, but less terrifying.

    --
    All rites reversed 2010