My Business collegue’s said I am one of the best engineers out there and they wanted to challenge me. They gave me a Tux-droid V2 from the defunct company Kysoh.com and asked me to get it back to a working condition. Now since they went out of business in 2010 all of the software is very out of date. It still needs a 32-bit plugin library so I have my work cut out for me. The reward: I could keep my $100 Tuxdroid if I get it working.
Although Linuxfriendly is a cloud-hosting provider based in Netherlands, this sounds like an exciting project I would be happy to take on.
The good:
- This droid is an impressive designed project with many functions on a robot.
- Wireless interface between laptop <-> Tuxdroid
- 4 motor functions to control the droid and give it a personality
- 3 switches to give functions
- A remote IR control to give it even more possible functions to choose from.
- A remote IR transmitter to control other equipment.
- A text-to-speech engine to allow it to “speak” to you , with many languages available including Dutch my native language!
- A Fish-dongle companion, instead of some ugly dongle.
The Bad:
- The manufacturor went out of business in 2010, and all domains/webpage have dissapeared
- The Tuxdroid uses a non-standard protocol to communicate with its dongle (a fish) ,
so far my wifi has not had interference but It may be a factor for others. - The text-to-speech library is propriatery and problably cannot be ported to the 64-bit-world.