Spykee facts for kids

Spykee is a cool robot toy made by Meccano. It has a USB webcam, a microphone, and speakers. You can control Spykee with a computer, either at home or even over the internet!

Imagine moving your robot around your house, taking pictures and videos, listening to what's happening, or playing fun sounds like robot laughs and laser guns through its speaker. Spykee can connect to the internet using Wi-Fi, so it can go online and do even more.

The electronic parts inside Spykee were created by a French company called WaveStorm.

Getting Started with Spykee

The idea for the Spykee robot came about in 2006. It started being sold in the United States in late 2008.

Putting Spykee Together

Spykee is made for kids aged 8 and up. The company says it takes about 1.5 hours to build. However, some people who bought it found that it actually takes a bit longer to put all the pieces together.

Making Spykee Even Better

Spykee is special because you can use other Meccano parts with it. This means you can add new pieces and change how your robot looks or works!

Customizing Your Robot

Some people have even changed their Spykee robots to make them do new things. For example, one owner made their robot's "head" (where the webcam is) move up and down. This lets them see more when taking pictures or videos!

Open-Source Fun

Spykee was advertised as an "open-source" robot. This means that people can get the main code that makes the robot work. Even though official tools for developers weren't released at first, fans created their own ways to explore and change Spykee.

There's an unofficial wiki website spykee.duskofsolace.com where you can find information on how to access the robot's inner workings. You can learn about its hardware and even find new unofficial software that helps with connecting to the robot and adding more storage.

By May 2010, the full code for the robot was made available online here. This allowed even more people to experiment and create new things for Spykee.

Controlling Spykee with Apps

People have also created special apps to control Spykee.

• Since October 2010, you can control Spykee using an Android smartphone with an app found at aspykee.com.
• There's also a program that lets you control Spykee from computers running Linux, which you can find at github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl.