The early history of home internet appliances was replete with wonderful curios as a new industry sought to both find a function for itself and deliver something useful with whatever semiconductors were available nearly two decades ago. A favourite of ours is the Nabaztag, a French-designed information appliance in the form of a cute plastic rabbit whose ears would light up and move around as it delivered snippets of information.
The entity behind the Nabaztag folded and the servers went away years ago of course, but the original designer [Olivier Mével] never gave up on his creation. Back in 2019 he created an updated mainboard for the device packing a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which has been released in a series of crowdfunding campaigns. If you have a Nabaztag and haven’t yet upgraded, you can snag one now as the latest campaign has started.
We took a look at the Nabaztag back in 2020, at the time with out bricked original unit. Happily a year later we were able to snag one of the upgrades, so it’s now happily keeping us up to date with the time, weather, and other fun things. The upgrade motherboard is designed to slot into the same place as the original and mate with all its connectors, and even comes with that annoying triangle screwdriver. If you want to stand out against all the Alexa and Google Home owners, dig out your cute rabbit from the 2000s and give it this board!
You could hack it, with an ardurino and also with a pico projector instead of this red leds.
Not worthy, even used cost this thing some hundreds. Do your taxed instead of hack something.
Oh wow, that’s cute.
*hits eBay to try and fnd one*
Oh wow, it’s not £3K cute!!!
Buy a Ikea FNISS Trash can instead, used top down and build the electronics yourself. You can sell it as art pice because you boycott the high price of the original.
But instead all the fuzz, i would like more a a.i. based magic mirror like from disney but more the power ranger version with Zordon.
‘Zordon, how is the weather today?….’
Or mehdi from elctro boom who explains circuits :-) :-) :-)
For that much, I better go dig mine out and list it.
Heh, yeah, I got one in a charity shop a couple of years ago. I’m pretty sure I still have it around somewhere.
Thought I was onto a good thing there, but prices are more like 200 quid…but that’s still not bad.
I never got one, and after getting a smartphone I really had no need for any such thing, but back before any of this stuff was common I was amazed at everything it could do. They also pitched the idea that you could link up with friends/family who also had the device, and the rabbit ears would sync so you could wave to one another or something. Now we’ve got video calls, of course.
Yes it was the idea back than, to keep in touch with your wife over electronic devices when you work abroad. Something like a connected lightswitch between your and her desklamp, so the other know when somebody goes to sleep. But the least pandemic had shown us another extreme and we realize that all the electronic devices are meaningless and we need real human interaction with somebody.
Eh, it might be better if a bit hyperbolic to say we realized that the extroverts lose their minds when they’re asked to limit how many strangers they touch, while the introverts would rather not have to dress up for the camera just to have meetings. Both would probably like to be in person with their loved ones when possible, but I don’t know if that’s really what we learned.
Looks evil to me.
This reminds me of the little rectangle box desktop assistants with a display from the mid 90s or so. Can’t remember their name…sometihng like a cubbie? Anyone know what I’m talking about? They were real propular for a while.
Chumby?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby
That was it. Thanks!
Let’s not forget another relic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
120 € for the TagTagTag kit + 12 € international shipping. Ahem… no thanks. BTW I have a useless Chumby here for you – interested?
Call me again when this sort of thing stops being a solution looking for a problem.