Nabaztag
Encyclopedia
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
enabled ambient electronic device in the shape of a rabbit, invented by Rafi Haladjian
Rafi Haladjian
Rafi Haladjian is a Lebanese-French-Armenian businessman, the inventor of Nabaztag. In 1978 he moved to France, studied linguistics. In June, 1994, he founded FranceNet - the first ISP in France. In 2000 FranceNet became Fluxus, and in 2001 was sold to British Telecom...
and Olivier Mével, and manufactured by the company Violet. Nabaztag was designed to be a "smart object" comparable to those manufactured by Ambient Devices
Ambient Devices
Ambient Devices, Inc. is a privately held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA that designs and markets various ambient devices for display of information ranging from weather to traffic reports to stock quotes. The company was founded by David L. Rose, Ben Resner, and Pritesh Gandhi,...
; it can connect to the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
(for example to download weather forecasts, read its owner's email, etc.). It was also customizable and programmable to an extent. Sylvain Huet developed most of the embedded code of all Violet objects. Sebastien Bourdeauducq developed the Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
driver . Antoine Schmitt has been their behavior designer and Jean-Jacques Birgé
Jean-Jacques Birgé
Jean-Jacques Birgé is an independent French musician and filmmaker, at once music composer , film director , multimedia author , sound designer Jean-Jacques Birgé is an independent French musician and filmmaker, at once music composer (co-founder of Un Drame Musical Instantané which with he records...
their sound designer (together they have also composed Nabaz'mob, an opera for 100 Nabaztag). Maÿlis Puyfaucher (who features its French voice) wrote all the original texts pronounced by the rabbit.
On 20 October 2009, following a long period of technical difficulties, ultimately leading to Violet's bankruptcy, Mindscape purchased Violet.
In the fall of 2010 Mindscape announced a third generation Nabaztag, called "Karotz".
On 27 July 2011, Mindscape stopped the maintenance of the Nabaztag and released its source code .
Features
Out of the box, Nabaztag is 23 cm in height and weighs 418 g. It can send and receive MP3s and messages that are read out loud as well as perform the following services (by either speaking the information out loud or using indicative lights): weather forecast, stock market report, news headlines, alarm clock, e-mail alerts, RSS-Feeds, MP3-Streams and others.There is an API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
, with bindings for multiple programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
s including Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
, Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
or PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
, available to program the Nabaztag.
At first talking only in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, as of June 2007, Nabaztag fully supports services in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
.
Community
Nabaztag owners can join social networkSocial network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
s to share photos
Photo sharing
Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user's digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others . This function is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images...
and videos on websites like Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
. Users can create podcasts (dubbed Nabcasts by Violet). There are currently over 100 of these available, mostly in English and French, created by different users on a variety of topics.
Since Nabaztag can be programmed to provide new services using an API as stated above, there are dozens of services available to date from other users, including a Dashboard widget and a lottery alarm.
December 2006 (most notably around the Christmas 25 December timeframe) a huge quantity of sold rabbits caused many troubles for Violet, the maker of Nabaztag. The Nabaztag device acts as a client to the French-based servers. When users attempted to register their new rabbits, the centralized servers were unable to handle the demand resulting in Service disruptions, server unavailability and data integrity problems caused by users creating multiple half-finished registrations. This resulted in a major customer service problem for Violet. The fundamental philosophy of Nabaztag (that all objects should be connected together on the internet and connected by a server maintained by Violet) is not always working (e.g. the server sometimes cannot cope with volume of traffic, services have had to be switched off, unreliable response times often slow to hours rather than seconds).
In March 2008, Violet changed their server infrastructure and bunny software to use the standard XMPP
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is an open-standard communications protocol for message-oriented middleware based on XML . The protocol was originally named Jabber, and was developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999 for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging , presence...
protocol. Bunnies are now sometimes reacting within seconds, instead of minutes, although this is by no means consistent and long delays do occur sometimes. The change caused service disruptions and problems for a couple of weeks.
Technical specifications
The device embeds a PIC18F6525 microcontrollerPIC microcontroller
PIC is a family of Harvard architecture microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1650 originally developed by General Instrument's Microelectronics Division...
, a BenQ
BenQ
BenQ Corporation is a Taiwanese multi-national company that sells and markets consumer electronics, computing and communications devices under the "BenQ" brand name, which stands for the company slogan Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to life .- Company :BenQ sells and markets technology products,...
PC card
PC card
In computing, PC Card is the form factor of a peripheral interface designed for laptop computers. The PC Card standard was defined and developed by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association which itself was created by a number of computer industry companies in the United States...
802.11b Wi-Fi adaptor, an ml2870a Audio-PCM sound generator
Sound generator
A sound generator is a vibrating object which produces a sound. There are two main kinds of sound generators ....
, an ADPCM converter, two motors to activate the ears, a TLC5922 LED
LEd
LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
controller, and a small amount of memory
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
.
The embedded software handles the TCP/IP stack and WiFi driver. It also implements a virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
which is able to execute up to 64kb of code. A dedicated assembly language
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
exists to program the different features of the device.
Nabaztag/tag
Out on market on 12 December 2006, Nabaztag/tag is an improved model of Violet's Nabaztag.The new model supports mp3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
audio streaming for internet radio (with preset radio stations and an app allowing to add your own stream that does not work) and podcasts. This second version Nabaztag has also added a microphone that allows for voice activation of some of its services. However, despite text on the website claiming that new services will be available soon, the number of working voice activated services remains less than a handful. A final added feature is a built-in RFID reader to detect special-purpose RFID tags (i.e. ISO/IEC 14443 Type B). Nabaztag advertisement is presenting the ability to identify objects (depicted are e.g. keys).
Nabaztag/tag can, as of November 2007, use RFID tags to read special edition versions of children's books by the French publisher Gallimard Jeunesse. In October 2008, Violet launched RFID Children's Books with Penguin Publishing House. Further RFID services and support have been promised. Violet has now started selling the Zstamps and Nano:ztag's (little mini Rabbits with Zstamps inside them) and another called mir:ror
Mir:ror
Mir:ror is a personal RFID reader that connects to a personal computer via a USB port. It was presented at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin in September 2008 and is produced by Violet, which also produces the Nabaztag. It is designed to work with Violet-produced RFID tags which are...
which is its own RFID system separate from the Nabaztag.
The Wi-Fi was also upgraded to support WPA
Wi-Fi Protected Access
Wi-Fi Protected Access and Wi-Fi Protected Access II are two security protocols and security certification programs developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks...
encryption, and now uses a cheaper SoftMAC card instead of the BenQ device which embedded its own 802.11 protocol stack.
Cessation of service
Mindscape, filing for bankruptcy, discontinued the Nabaztag/tag web service in late July 2011.Alternative servers are available, including:
Karotz
Karotz is the third generation Nabaztag, and first to be released since the Mindscape purchase. Like its predecessors, Karotz connects to the Internet using Wifi and has RFID reading capability. Additionally, it includes an integrated web cam, a USB port (which can be used for power as well as connectivity), and 256MB of onboard storage. Karotz was released in April 2011.Award
Violet was awarded honourable mentions, category Small companies of the DME Award 2007 for Nabaztag.Nabaztag/tag was awarded for Netxplorateur of the Year in 2008.
Nabaz'mob was awarded by Prix Ars Electronica
Prix Ars Electronica
The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music...
Digital Musics 2009 (Award of Distinction).
External links
- Musics/Radios on your nabaztag - Musics/Radios on nabaztag
- The Nabzone - All you need to play with your Nabaztag and custom your Smart Rabbit
- Nabaz'mob - the opera site
- Bunny Messenger - IM for Nabaztag - An AIR app which allows you to send Text-To-Speech Messages, MP3 Streams, and Ear -LED Choreographies to Nabaztags. Compatible with Mac OS X / Windows / Linux