PleoBot.com - Pleo The Dinosaur

Reuters features a video of Pleo taken at CeBIT:

HowStuffWorks.com has a great article on “How Pleo Works.” The article gathers information from publicly available information and from exclusive interviews with the designers of Pleo. The article discusses Pleo’s sensors, behavior and movement, his processors, and his motors.

They also have a good discussion and neat applet that lets you see how (and play with) Pleo’s tail works.

Great read!

Pleo Dreams.com has been busy taking apart their Pleo and taking videos of his guts! Check out his Brain Surgery and Thoractomy videos. Brain surgery after the jump.

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ifixit.com has completely disassembled their Pleo and posted pictures of how they did it. It’s pretty amazing the amount of stuff that’s inside of Pleo. I doubt that their Pleo will work again. Sacrificing Pleo for the sake of science.

Poll results for December:

Are you going to purchase a Pleo in time for Christmas?

* Yes, for me!: 45% (21)
* Yes, for someone else: 21% (10)
* No, I’ll wait: 13% (6)
* No, too poor: 15% (7)
* Not sure: 6% (3)

There is also a new poll up. Happy voting!

Big news from UGOBE tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Mike at Pleo Dreams has found a list of what looks like Pleo’s internal variables. I’ll include them after the jump. Interestingly though, one of them is “blood_sugar”. There are plenty of other interesting ones like, “picked_up”, “sound_direction”, “shake_present”, and “tilt_direction”.

I’m really excited about the though of all these variables being available in the upcoming SDK.

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Via fescue’s Flickr photoset.

Blogger Mike, at Pleo’s Dreams blog, discovered Pleo’s debug port.

The port is under a glued-on piece of plastic next to Pleo’s power switch.

There’s a post on the PleoWorld forums about hacking Pleo’s battery.
The battery pack is a 7.2v pack made up of 6 2200mAh NiMH cells. NiMH’s have a nominal voltage of 1.2v each. The battery pack has three terminals - plus, minus and a thermistor to measure the temperature of the cells. One poster, “pleohacker” points out that since Pleo is running many motors and it’s electrical circuitry off the same pack, the cells need very low internal resistance in order to prevent the processors from shutting down (using a brownout circuit) when the cells voltage drops.

The thermistor may also be used to “nap” Pleo when the battery pack gets too hot. Any adventurous hackers out there have any comments?