It looks like its been nearly 6 months since I last did an update. Interestingly enough, several things have happened in that time. The site has been transition to a new version, and might get a layout change in the near future.

So first up, WowWee's 2008 range has been announced. There are a lot more offerings this year than the last few years. Of particular interest are Rovio and the RoboRemote. Both of these should be interesting to play with when released.

Next up, I finally broke down and wrote a few articles for RoboCommunity. They are RoboPanda Disassembled, RoboBoa Dissected and C Programming for the RS Media. Milw has written a nice companion piece for the programming article that is also worth a read, Connecting to the RS Media Linux Console, which is somewhat more complete than my own Howto on the subject.

Over on the RoboSapien.TK forums, helibot noticed that there were several IO lines available on the RS Media's main board. He's also figured out how to access them (Note, you will need to be able to compile C programs for the RS Media, see the article linked to above for more information). So in theory additional hardware could be interfaced to the RS Media with a little effort.

Finally, sevik popped up out of the the blue, and started hacking the RoboPanda's cartridges. The results he has achieved are impressive. Things are going well, but homebrew cartridges are still a fair way off.