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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.
[
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
[
edit] External
links