Hi, this thing is made for hacking! That was a major consideration I had in mind when designing it. There are 2 ports specifically for over riding the existing electronics with another micro controller. I'm pestering the electronics guys right now to get the specs on that.
Also, the accessories are easy to remove, leaving a couple standard plugs that deliver power that is controlled by the controller. I plan to show how to make some custom accessories, and am excited to see others build custom accessories of their own!
I really hope Jamie manages to get us that info about the electronics - it looks like it should to be possible to interface with the robot without hacking the hardware, but it's not immediately obvious how...
I've been experimenting with my own Attacknid (basically the same robot) but I've been holding off bypassing the electronics in the hope that this info will eventually appear!
The two ports Jamie mentions are a pair of unused barrel-jacks on the head; I've found that shorting the inside of one port to the outside barrel of either port will cause the robot to either walk forward or backward.
The circuit-board has some labels, in Chinese - but most of those will refer to the motors they're attached to
Tracing the circuit, I saw that the port-outsides are connected to two pins on the board's (unlabelled) main chip.
I tried to see if it might send/accept serial data, but no luck (my skills are weak here though)
I also tried seeing if a variable resistor might make the back/forward connections turn into left/right, but didn't have any luck with that either.
There's a 3.2v supply between the port-insides, so it could certainly power external electronics - the question is whether it'll actually interface!
This is all very frustrating! I bet we'd see many hacks for this toy if the port-interface methods became publically available - assuming this actually works, of course!
Looks cool.
I'm really sorry Jamius didn't make his kickstarter project.
As I have still lots of other stuff lying around to play with I doubth I will buy a Attacknid soon.
I can not recall a statement of jamius about the hackability of the Attacknid compared to the kickstarter kit.
I hope he relaunches the kit someday.
Best regards
Jantje
Sucks that I missed this one. Jamius has really awesome vids and watched most of them I think. Guy is a little off, but makes up for it with his imagination.
I will second the wish that he makes another attempt. I would be on the band wagon this time.
