Resurrecting the Nabaztag IoT Bunnies from 2005 #IoT #RaspberryPi #OpenSource
In 2005, in the dark age of the Internet, the only way to access information is through a computer (well, you can also use a WAP phone).
But a revolutionary object was about to change that. It’s not a phone, it’s a bunny: Nazbaztag!
The bunny was helpful in many ways:
ambient display of information (visual and sound): weather forecast, air quality, traffic…
sound contents: podcast or web radios
fun stuff: jokes, absurd clock, reading books…
communication: sound messenger or ear communications (remember this?!?)
voice recognition (2005 yeah!)
150,000 bunnies were sold worldwide and a crazy community of users gathered around the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.
This was all going pretty well, with the weekly crash of the Violet server infrastructure, but in 2008, things got very messy. Violet closed down and Nabaztag was bought-out by Mindscape then Aldebaran Robotics and in 2015 the servers were shut down leaving the bunnies dead as a brick.
Resurrection!
After Maker Faire 2018, an easy-to-install refurbishment kit was developed. A kit installed in a Nabaztag or a Nabaztag:tag which would bring the bunny back to life. The kit is designed to replace the old-vintage electronic board by a new one paired with a Raspberry Pi. All the development, software and hardware, are Open Source, if you’re technically interested you can check the GitHub repository.
The goal was also to free it from the cloud, a cloud that causes so much suffering in the rabbits lives. Now, even without any Internet connection, Nabaztag will still say jokes and do its Taïchi.
The kits to bring the Nabaztag to life are now available via Ulule.
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