The future has arrived in form of the Spykee Wifi robot. While the product is clearly aimed at a young audience, I stumbled across it during a recent Woot-Off and for $100 it became mine, because once you look beyond the toy appearance you will find some interesting stats:

• 200 MHz ARM9
• 32Mb SDRAM
• 4Mb NOR Flash
• WiFi client 802.11b/g
• USB host
• 8-bits VC to control the dual DC motor and control the charge
• 4 status LEDs
• Infrared receiver
• Charge control for the 9.6V NiMH battery
• JTAG / Serial / port i2c port available
• Loudspeaker 8 Ohm 2W
• Audio sampler microphone 16bits / 16 kHz
• Sampler speaker 16bits / 8 to 48 kHz

Yes, you will find all this inside the base of this toy, plus it comes with a web cam with build in microphone and white LED. As the final touch, the unit can self dock and charge.

Since I left most of the plastic junk off the unit (only the webcam actually does anything, everything else is in the base.), I quickly turned this toy into a webcam I can drive around my house from work! My cats are not quite as excited by this:



The unit is controlled via a proprietary software available for Windows and Macs, but the protocol has been deciphered and alternative software is in the early stages of development. The unit can be used in ad-hoc mode or with an access point - and if you know how to open up a few ports, it can then be controlled from anywhere in the world with Internet!

The track drive on the unit works great when it has to overcome an occasional sock or cord, but cannot handle any stairs or otherwise non-flat surfaces. The camera produces good video at 320x240 and the internal speaker and microphone on the unit do their job just fine. Only bad point so far is the battery run time, only around 15-20 mins of driving around time until the unit want to dock again.

In regards to hacking not too much done has been done with this robot, but firmware with USB and NFS mounting capabilities and telnetd running are available. One hardware modification was to add the ability to move the camera up and down to be able to see more - although I found that a $2.58 Wide-Angle "Jelly Lens" works even better to improve the viewing angle.

But even with those shortcomings, this is a great product. I wish it was less aimed at kids and that Meccano would take their developers more seriously, but it is a blast either way.

While the WANSER-R was a great device, a recent upgrades to my storage space finally forced me to move away from FAT32 and in turn away from the WANSER-R.

As a replacement, I picked up the WLX-652 USB NAS from DealExtreme, my preferred Hong Kong seller. Equipped with two USB 2.0 ports and a build in BitTorrent client, plus support for NTFS and EXT2/3 it seemed like a good choice. A few weeks later the unit arrives and first impressions are good as well - the unit feels solid, is well made and seemed to initially work just fine.

However, after using the unit for a few days I quickly noticed some major drawbacks:

- Mounting of NTFS partitions is unreliable and access is quite slow
- The BitTorrent client requires all the units resources, making the SMB server unresponsive
- Worst Part: The unit would crash frequently, especially under high load.

After initially suspecting an overheating problem, I found out that the crashing issue seems to be fairly widespread with this units and even a firmware update did not resolve it. It seems to be a case of sloppy programing of the firmware.

Luckily, it turns out that this sloppy programing had some other side effects: It permits easy access to the units file system and in turn interested a group of users into hacking this device. The unit seems to be running on a Star 8132 system-on-a-chip, has 32MB memory and 4MB flash.

The result, the so called SNAKE OS Linux is not only stable, but has also been updated to contain the latest Transmission BT daemon, SSH support and an improved file system. I am currently running the SNAKE OS Beta 2r1 (and will soon be upgrading to the Beta 3) and I had up times of 10 days and more. You can find SNAKE OS firmware here:

DealExtreme NAS Google Group

Keep in mind that this firmware is beta and installing it may void your warranty, etc. I also want to mention that while this unit still supports NTFS, this support requires a lot of system resources and it is recommended that ext3 or ext2 is used instead, especially when using Transmission.

Update: DealExtreme started shipping a new version of this unit, marked as WLX 652R. The WLX 652R is NOT COMPATIBLE with the Smake OS!

Here is the latest firmware I was able to obtain for my NAS adapter, 1.48a. If you currently have a branded firmware (including the 1.42b from the post below), you will not be able to use this firmware due to the OEM name/webtag check.

There is a way to circumvent this checkwebtag issue. The WANSER-R uses two verifications when a firmware file is uploaded - it checks the firmware header for the proper OEM name and the file checksum before updating.

Warning: Do this at your own risk. All instructions provided as is. This may damage ("brick") your NAS and/or result in data loss. Read full disclaimer here.

If you currently have a 1.39 or earlier firmware you do NOT need these steps - just upload the firmware file for the 1.48 should work. These steps assume that you have the 1.42 MRT version of the firmware installed (from previous blog post).

Firmware Version G5S5020300148A0 L:1.17 . If you go to http://NAS/__config.htm, you should see VENDOR="MRT"; CHECKWEBTAG="1" [...]

To circumvent the webtag check and to upload the 1.48a, follow these steps:

1. Download this 1.38 firmware file. It has been altered to contain the MRT webtag. I did this with a hex editor by just comparing with the 1.42 MRT firmware file.

2. Unpack and upload the R3282_1_38a_MRT_header.bin to your WANSER-R

3. The WANSER-R should "think" a few seconds after the upload before giving you the incorrect file error. This is because the file passes the initial header check, but not the checksum.

4. Now open man_firm.html on the WANSER-R to force the update
http://NAS/man_firm.htm

5. The unit should reboot and once completed will be running the 1.38 firmware again. If the unit does not reboot after the update wait 5 mins then reset it to default settings: Unplug, push and hold reset button, plug back in and wait for 30 seconds, while still pushing the reset button, then power cycle again.

6. Now just update your firmware to the 1.48a from this post, the 1.38 firmware will accept this file and it will change your vendor to BASIC and your webchecktag to 0: VENDOR="BASIC"; CHECKWEBTAG="0". Again, if the unit does not reboot after the update, wait 5 mins then reset it to default settings: Unplug, push and hold reset button, plug back in and wait for 30 seconds, while still pushing the reset button, then power cycle again.

Once you have the checkwebtag set to 0, you can upload any firmware - just keep in mind that any branded (MRT or Addonics) firmware version 1.41 or higher will set the checkwebtag to 1 again.

Good luck.

After my efforts to add network attached storage to my Asus router failed (well, it did work, but only with USB 1.1 speed) I started looking for a flexible solution to attach a large hard drive to my network.

After looking at some strange IDE NAS drive enclosures on eBay, I came across the Addonics NAS Adapter - a small network dongle that provides the missing link between ethernet and USB. The feature list on the website was perfect, as the unit supports both SMB ("Samba" = Windows networking) and FTP and on top of that has a build in Bit Torrent client. For $55 the price was right and I ordered the adapter from ShopAddonics.com.

I have been using the NAS Adapter for a week now and I am quite impressed. I am using the unit with a 500GB Hitachi SATA drive in an USB 2.0 enclosure and the adapter recognizes and uses the hard drive flawlessly. Over SMB I get speeds around 8MB/sec when using Ethernet and around 2MB/sec over Wifi, which is in line with the expected speed for those networks. The NAS adapter runs smoothly even under heavy load (4 torrents, uploading to the HDD via wifi and streaming a video off the drive at he same time is no problem). The unit is entirely controlled via a web interface and can act both as a DHCP client or server. Both SMB and FTP allow multiple users and access levels.

The build in bit torrent client is reasonably fast and can handle up to 4 downloads simultaneously. Performance is quite solid and the unit is capable to resume downloads after a reboot (even though the manual claims differently).



Overall I am quite impressed with this small device and was curious to find out what's ticking on the inside. Unfortunately, the casing had no visible way of opening it and I didn't want to break the small device, so I did some Internet research.

What I found:

This device is an OEM product, meaning that Addonics only does QA control, but did not develop this unit. The 'official' part number seems to be WANSER-R. I was not able to find the actual manufacturer, but on the inside seems to be a RDC R3210 system on a chip. the R3210 is a 32bit RISC processor, running at 133Mhz. It has buildin ethernet and USB, plus dual DMA controllers, making it quite fitting for the job.

You can find the specs sheet of the R3210 in PDF here.

My Addonics NAS Adapter came with firmware 1.33c, which was stable but I found a 1.42b update on the this site (look for WANSER-R). Make sure you read the included readme. The 1.42b appears to be solid as well and I've noticed an increase in BitTorrent performance. Unfortunately, Addonics has not made any of the recent firmware updates available through their site. The unit appears to be linux based and there is an OpenWRT build for the R3210, but I did not make any attempt at flashing this unit with 3rd party firmware.