Even the most thorough inspection may not raise the alarm that this Rovio has been hacked to include LED headlights. [Adam Outler’s] super clean work puts the two light sources on either side of the camera for maximum effect. It may not provide as many Lumens as our external headlight hack, but we were never all that excited about the black project box that housed it. [Adam] built the circuit on a scrap of perfboard, using a transistor to connect the LED pair to the battery, with the original LED power wire going to the base in order to switch the transistor.
Too bad it doesn’t fix the faulty battery charging circuit that it is tapping in to.
David, yeah mine is never charging correctly and always out of juice when i want to use it :(
I’m currently working on better lighting and maybe even some laser assisted navigation, but on the spytech video trakr as opposed to Rovio.
Neat piece though, and a VERY cool hack!
spy gear excuse me
@TheMoogle , I took a robotics class this past semester in which we used these. Of all the problems, the battery was the most annoying. We ended up having to take the battery out of each one and manually charge it. Something about the circuit does not allow the battery to charge to capacity.
@strider_mt2k , navigation is really neat to play with. The Rovio uses an IR based dead-reckoning system. Dead-reckoning becomes wilding inaccurate with it after about 2 meters though.
From what I’ve read, the battery does not charge because 6v cannot charge a battery to 6v. It needs a better charger circuit.
What? This is not an Angry Birds bat-signal?
maybe an IR led and then a reg one would be great. pseudo night vision
Finally a ROVIO battery charging fix.
Looks like a wrongly placed diode (backwards installed) on the ROVIO charging board is the major cause of the Rovio’s not charging the battery !!! Now my lump of plastic may live again with this fix and a new battery.
http://www.robocommunity.com/forum/thread/17304/Battery-problem-solution-a-discovery/#47869
Where is the induction charging circuit that will allow the Rovio to park over it to recharge itself?
@cknopp
I know, right? I mean, with all the recent HAD posts about adding induction to everything, you’d think someone would add induction to their Rovio.
I think that maybe an RFID tag in the dock (rather than dead reckoning) would provide better guidance? I’m no expert, but it’s just an idea.
crap…