One of my teachers discovered the Nabaztag some time ago, and he wants to use it as a big project for second year students. A Nabaztag is a small rabbit-formed thingy that connects to nabaztag.com through your Wifi network, and that has ears that can move, lights that can change colour, and it can make sounds.
So he asked me and another student to reverse engineer the thing so we could control what it does, how and when. The idea is that we make a start that second year students can play with later, and we're supposed to learn a few things from it ourselves in the mean time (we get a few European Credits for it).
We discovered that some people had already started on a .NET implementation of a proxy server to catch all data transmitted to and from nabaztag.com by the rabbit, and a start in controlling the rabbit through an interface on a PC.
To my delight I discovered that you can send small assembly programs to the rabbit, which it will execute once received
The assembly programs are run in a virtual machine inside the rabbit, so you don't have to worry about interfacing with the wireless network or anything, you just give commands to the firmware which will execute them for you. So it's not all that much more difficult than calculator assembly, apart from the fact that I've had to learn a new set of opcodes and a different memory lay-out.So the last two days I've been programming assembly in our computer lab not only legally for a change, but also supported by several teachers and for the Greater Good of my education
You should see people's faces when I make a plastic white rabbit do "plingpling", move it's ears and change colour
Check out my source
:Phttp://timendus.student.utwente.nl/~is3 ... hp/Timware
And check out these amateurs* not being able to properly control the rabbits, which we plan to do better
http://nabazmob.free.fr/nabazfilm.html
*) who happen to be the people who originally programmed the things, but whatever
