Nabaztag

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Nabaztag
Nabaztag
The 100 Rabbit Opera at the 2006 NextFest in New York
The 100 Rabbit Opera at the 2006 NextFest in New York

Nabaztag (Armenian for "rabbit" wiktionary:en:) is a Wi-Fi enabled electronic device in the shape of a rabbit, invented by Rafi Haladjian and Olivier Mével, and manufactured by Violet [1]. Nabaztag is a "smart object" comparable to those manufactured by Ambient Devices; it can connect to the Internet (for example to download weather forecasts, read its owner's email, etc). It is also fully customizable and programmable.

Contents

[edit] Features

Out of the box, Nabaztag is 23 cm in height and weighs 418 g. It can send and receive MP3s and messages that are read out loud as well as perform the following services (by either speaking the information out loud or using indicative lights): weather forecast, stock market report, news headlines, alarm clock, e-mail alerts, RSS-Feeds, MP3-Streams and others.

There is an API, with bindings for multiple programming languages including Java or Perl, available to program the Nabaztag[2].

At first talking only in English and French, as of June 2007, Nabaztag fully supports services in German, Italian and Spanish, and reads text messages in 16 different languages: English (USA), English (GB), Spanish, German, French, Italian, Flemish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish and Polish.

[edit] Community

Some Nabaztag owners join social networks to share photos and videos on websites like Flickr and YouTube. Users can create podcasts (dubbed Nabcasts by Violet). There are currently over 100 of these available, mostly in English and French, created by different users on a variety of topics.

Since Nabaztag can be programmed to provide new services using an API as stated above, there are dozens of services available to date from other users, including a Dashboard widget and a lottery alarm.

December 2006 (most notably around the Christmas December 25th timeframe) the unexpectedly huge quantity of sold rabbits caused many troubles for Violet, the maker of Nabaztag. The Nabaztag device acts as a client to the French-based servers. When many users attempted to register their new rabbits, the centralized servers were unable to handle the demand resulting in many Service disruptions, server unavailability and data integrity problems caused by frustrated users creating multiple half-finished registrations. This resulted in a major customer service problem for Violet.

In March 2008, Violet changed their server infrastructure and bunny software to use the standard XMPP (Jabber) protocol. Bunnies are now reacting within seconds, instead of minutes. However, the change caused service disruptions and problems.

[edit] Technical Specifications

The device embeds a PIC18F6525 microcontroller, a BenQ PC card 802.11b Wi-Fi adaptor, an ml2870a Audio-PCM sound generator, an ADPCM converter, two motors to activate the ears, a TLC5922 LED controller, and a small amount of memory.

The embedded software handles the TCP/IP stack and WiFi driver. It also implements a virtual machine which is able to execute up to 64kb of code. A dedicated assembly language exists to program the different features of the device.

[edit] Nabaztag/tag

Out on market on December 12th 2006, Nabaztag/tag is an improved model of Violet's Nabaztag. The new model supports mp3 audio streaming for internet radio and podcasts. This second version Nabaztag has also added a microphone that allows for voice activation of some of its services. A final added feature is a built-in RFID reader to detect special-purpose RFID tags (ie ISO14443 Type-B). Nabaztag advertisement is presenting the ability to identifiy objects (depicted are e.g. keys).

Nabaztag/tag can, as of November 2007, use RFID tags to read special edition versions of children's books by the French publisher Gallimard Jeunesse[3]. Further RFID services and support have been promised[4]). Despite advertising these RFID features as a product feature since 12/2006, Violet is not yet offering the needed RFID tags (called "Ztamps").

The Wi-Fi was also upgraded to support WPA encryption, and now uses a cheaper SoftMAC card instead of the BenQ device which embedded its own 802.11 protocol stack.[5][6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Violet
  2. ^ the Nabaztools homepage
  3. ^ Online store description
  4. ^ The "smell" feature is demoed in a Flash movie at the Nabaztag website.
  5. ^ "New Nabaztag/tag", i4U, November 9, 2006. 
  6. ^ "lekernel.net", November 13, 2007. 

[edit] External links