Today I checked in with Make: Labs to see what our faithful interns are working on, and Kris Magri showed me the setup pictured above. A while back she was given a Tomy i-Sobot and tasked with hacking it. The thing she liked least about the i-Sobot is how complicated and clunky the remote control is, namely the fact that the action button sequences are long and not easy to remember.
Given that the Gameboy Advance SP can be found on eBay starting at $20, has a great little screen and buttons, and the link cable connection is actually a serial port, she started working on programming it. Kris built onto an existing program (thanks, Avelino Herrera Morales), hooked 4 LEDs to the port, and got the lights to blink. The next step will be to hook it up to the XBee wireless module, hook another onto the i-Sobot, and get to programming. She intends to make graphics to illustrate the i-Sobots movements. Here’s a quick video of her current setup in action:
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