UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

Oooo, it’s a box …

… filled with paper …

I wonder what lives in a box like this, find out after the jump …


Bunny!

Officially it’s a Nabaztag, the Armenian word for rabbit apparently, it’s a WiFi enabled gadget that provides various alerts etc. But more of that in a second let’s get it set up, after introducing it to the natives.

In theory configuration is simple, you just plug in the Nabaztag and it’ll connect to a WiFi network and use that to contact the server. Then you go to nabaztag.com and create an account and link your rabbit to the account by entering your serial number. It comes configured to attach to the best unsecured wireless network it can find, but you can use a configuration mode to select a network and enter proxy/security details if you need to. Life was less simple for me as my rabbit was second hand, therefore I had to follow the extended steps to re-register it. It took several goes through these steps before it eventually got registered, I’m not sure why, probably a combination of my not really paying attention and the dodgy translation of the instructions.

Once it’s all set up you can add various services to the rabbit. There’s not too many services on offer at the moment, and the better ones require a monthly subscription, but I’m not really interested in it for the ‘offical’ abilities (although I’ll probably use the messaging and play with the ‘nabcasts’).

What excites me about this gadget is that they offer an API (PDF link) that allows you to control the rabbit’s lights and movements via the main server, meaning you can write any service you can think of. The API is in early days of development and so it doesn’t have everything just yet but what it does already is pretty cool. Even better than that, there’s already an effort to reverse engineer the server to allow your bunny to register with a local machine giving you complete control over it. There’s development forums springing up too (some are even in English) with people experimenting with different things.

So why did I buy it? Well, it combines my love of gadgets, communications and ebay in a single impulse purchase for one. I also think it’s quite a novel little idea, I love that it uses WiFi and provides a functional two-way interface (you can move the ears by hand and read their position remotely) that’s completely different to everything else and it doesn’t look like a computer despite the fact that it basically is.

I’m hoping integrate some sort of functionality, as an example, into UnorthodoxY.com, so I’ll be talking about the bunny again once I get some spare time to code up the required bits and bobs.

Until then Bunny waits quietly, connected, ready for action …